I’ve made an effort to meet more women lately, and I’ve definitely succeeded. One thing I can definitely appreciate is the need for more women-oriented conferences and breakout sessions. Too often, women are discouraged from becoming techies because they don’t think they have as many skills as the guys — when, in reality, it’s often that men tend to boast and brag and women are socialized to be more modest about their achievements.

I’m in support of events like the Women 2.0 conference because it is important for women, especially younger women, to meet and get to know women who have become successful. If you are a woman entrepreneur or woman techie in the Bay Area, I encourage you to attend. If you know of a woman who would benefit from being a part of this, please forward this blog entry or their website on to her.

Thanks!

Woooooooo!!!

*Erica stops running around the room long enough to type a blog*

Most of you know that I designed the Simpli website years ago (in 2002, to be precise.) It has since not really changed. While it desperately needs a facelift, I don’t have the time for it and I can’t really afford to hire a designer (even though we have some great ones hosting with us at Simpli!)

So when I saw a contest for web hosts where the prize was a free website redesign, I submitted Simpli.

The field was narrowed to 20 contestants last week and I was asked to submit answers to several questions about why we wanted a website redesign. Since I’m best with essays, I turned it into an essay… and even attached some pictures of our staff! Here is the first part of my essay:

Last month, I received a phone call from a potential customer. “We’ve used your service before and you guys were fantastic,” he said. “We’re interested in a dedicated server for a new project, and I was wondering if you could answer a few questions.”

“Sure!” I said.

“We looked at your website, but we can’t figure out what we need from it,” he said. “Honestly, we really love you guys, but if we would have stumbled on this website without having used your service, we would have not ordered from you.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Why is that?”

“It looks unprofessional and I can’t find the answers to my questions on it,” he replied. “That’s why I called you.”

This customer went on to place a $1,690.00 order with us for a year upfront of a dedicated server on October 21, 2005. That’s $1,690.00 that we undeniably would have lost due to our website design had he not worked with us previously and known our service and level of professionalism.

My conversation with that customer is what made me apply for ReInvention.

We are looking for a website that really showcases our commitment to our customers and our personal service. We want a completely unique website that we can be proud of. One thing that I really want to get rid of are those stock photos of “happy telemarketers” that are on so many websites. Our current website has some, too. I have attached two pictures that are the “real” Simpli — one is of one of our employees, Ben, building a server, and the other one is of me cheesin’ with some RAM and processors that we recently ordered for a customer. These are the kinds of things I want to put on our website. I really want to give off the vibe that we are REAL people who care about our customers, and that customers can always reach us when they have a problem or concern. That’s what has garnered us hundreds of satisfied customers so far, and our current website shows none of that. I also want to post some in-depth testimonials from current customers — we can furnish audio and customer pictures, which I think would be a unique way to do a testimonial.

The winner was announced today — and guess what…it was Simpli! 😀 Simpli has won a $5000 website redesign courtesy of Template Monster. With the redesign contest comes lots of free publicity, too, since this is like a reality TV show for the web where they go in-depth explaining every piece of the redesign and why they made the decisions they made.

I’ll keep posting with the results as we get them, but expect a complete facelift of www.simpli.biz in a few months. It certainly deserves it. I can’t wait to see what we come up with!

P.S. James of TemplateMonster explains why they chose Simpli.
Edit 8/15/2008: Since this link is now dead, I pulled James’s post from archive.org to save for posterity here:

I received 13 briefs we (David (CEO of Template Monster), Paul, and me) had to choose from.

Now we are ready to announce the winner of the contest. It is… www.simpli.biz!
Our congratulations to Erica Douglass!
We really like her brief and the company of course but not the website as it really needs some help on design.

I now quote Paul on the reasons why we have chosen simpli.biz:

Quote:
1. She is the most open to changes and new direction when it comes to
her company image.

2. She can readily identify why her current site isn’t working, not just
whether she likes or dislikes it, but how her business is directly
impacted by the design and engineering of it.

3. Her needs are manageable. Her site is sizable, but not overwhelming
for a first-time Reinvention project.

4. She expresses herself better than any other candidate. She will be
easy to work with when it comes to keeping the project moving and
working with her content.

5. From a visual design perspective, she needs help about as badly as
anyone, worse than most 🙂

We would like to thank all the applicants who took the time to send us their briefs.
Most of the sites submitted need some design help but we are limited with our resources and cannot help each applicant. We are really sorry about it. But we hope that you will stick to ReInvention so you could learn how to produce good design.

The past week (last Saturday to this Saturday) has possibly been… no, scratch that… has definitely been the worst week I’ve ever had since starting Simpli.

As my last blog entry states, October was our best month ever. We signed an avalanche of new dedicated server customers. We got a huge order for hardware. And pretty quickly — toward the beginning of October — I realized Russ and I, as the only two full-time employees at Simpli, weren’t going to be able to handle it all ourselves. I was working an extra 2-4 hours a day doing support tickets, and Russ was pulling 12 hours a day as well. We kept adding new customers, but we were already maxed out on available time to work at Simpli.

But I dreaded interviewing again. Then I remembered that Brandon had interviewed another candidate and seemed positive about him. So Russ and I pulled him for another interview. After the interview, it was really a tossup whether we should hire him, but I felt that we could use the help, and I was about to go insane with work overload.

Unfortunately, our new hire didn’t really know anything about Linux, despite the claims on his resume. Russ was frustrated by having to teach him basics like how to SSH into a server and restart a service. This was the week before last.

Last Saturday (8 days ago), the shit started to hit the fan. Meowcat, one of our shared servers, started having strange issues with PHP. Squirrelmail broke. To make matters worse, in an unrelated-to-meowcat incident, we tripped a power breaker at Market Post Tower.

Normally, a breaker trip is, well, not really a pleasant experience, but at least it’s an easy one to recover from. You move some servers onto another circuit breaker, turn the breaker back on, and everything works. At least that’s how it always happened at AboveNet.

Market Post Tower apparently doesn’t have the same safeguards that AboveNet does, because when we turned the breaker back on, a power surge hit our servers. That’s actually only our best guess on what happened, since all we know is that at least 8 servers failed within the next 24 hours, and they were all on that circuit. I mean complete failures — motherboard and PSU toasted. The machines wouldn’t even boot.

Russ and I started digging out the spare servers, and finally found enough to get everyone back online. We had to give 2 people some really nice free upgrades, which I’m sure they appreciated, and we ended up sending back over $3000 in servers to be warranty replaced. We worked over 40 combined hours that weekend.

People were starting to complain about meowcat, and to make a really long story short, it took 5 people, over 50 hours of work, and 5 days to figure out what the problem was with PHP and Squirrelmail. We thought that there was an OS corruption, so we decided to move all 400+ sites on meowcat to another server. meowcat’s RAID array was also showing some flakiness, which hastened the decision to move all sites to another server.

The move was intense, culminating with me at the office at about 4:15AM one night last week (I think it was Thursday morning at that point; I’d only left the office since the previous Saturday to sleep, and I wasn’t getting much of that either) and Russ staying up all night that night to fix the issues that just kept cropping up. I left the office, having just worked a 16-hour day, and the stupid Squirrelmail/PHP issue was still not fixed. By now I knew it had to be a configuration issue, but I was too exhausted to track it down.

I finally made an appearance at the office again Thursday afternoon, having gotten a scant 4 hours of sleep. I found Russ passed out on the couch since he hadn’t slept at all yet. That day, Russ, Mooneer, and I all pulled our weight, and Ben was off duty, so he wasn’t in the picture, but our new employee couldn’t fix any customer issues because he simply didn’t have the knowledge to fix the issues. Exhausted, I spent a few more hours fixing customer issues and listening and reading complaint after complaint about meowcat’s issues. I knew at that point I had to let our new hire go, so I called him into my office that afternoon and dismissed him. He was a really nice guy, but the technical skills were completely missing, and we didn’t have the time to train someone. We needed someone who could hit the ground running and step in to fix urgent issues like those on meowcat.

In the meantime, I finally realized that our Cisco “guru” we hired as a contractor had completely flaked out on us, and sent him a termination letter as well. This left us in a rush to find a new Cisco contractor, which (hopefully) we have found this week. He’s supposed to meet with us Monday afternoon, which means we may finally get our new networking gear in shape and ready to deploy.

We’re also interviewing for a new person on Monday, who hopefully will be a good fit for us. His resume looks promising. Russ and I have learned from our previous experience and we plan to give him a short written test about some of the Linux fundamentals (for instance: what does the ifconfig command do?)

On Saturday (11/5), another circuit tripped, this time at AboveNet. Russ handled it with aplomb, though, and got everything back online so quickly that most of our customers didn’t even notice. (We are enacting a policy that if anything like that happens again, we’ll notify everyone who was affected quickly so they can confirm that everything is back online and working.) Meanwhile, I finally broke down under stress on Saturday afternoon. A couple friends helped me through it, though, and for that I am grateful. I don’t often have stress breakdowns, but this time I pushed myself too hard for an entire week, and ended up in a bad mental state for a lot of this weekend. I pushed through it today (Sunday) and again spent a whole day working so that the support tickets would be cleared up for Mooneer in the morning. There is still a ton of stuff that needs to be done, but I feel like the balance is finally starting to tip in our favor, and once we hire another full-time person, I can stop manning the support desk and go back to just being sales and CEO.

What did I learn from all this? A couple really important things. First was a lesson relearned. C told me this a long time ago. He said he lets everyone on his team vote to hire or not hire a new person, and if even one person says “no”, he doesn’t hire that person. That’s smart. Hiring is tough, but it’s not impossible. A lot of it is gut instinct. My gut instinct told me our new hire wasn’t going to work, but I figured anyone was better than no one. That was really a bad assumption, and I won’t make that mistake again. Next time, we have to be 100% sure the new hire will be competent and will be able to do the job.

Second, I push myself way too hard sometimes. In an effort to shield Russ from breaking down under pressure, I sacrificed my own well-being (first sleep, and then a healthy mental state) by working crazy hours. What I forgot, though, is that Russ is perfectly capable of drawing those boundaries and pushing back on me when he’s had too much. It’s important for me to be able to take that step back and realize when I can’t push myself any more. I felt things starting to break down for me on Friday, and by Saturday afternoon I was a mess. It lasted until sometime really late last night — somewhere beween SuperHappyDevHouse and bowling — when I finally started to relax and feel like a normal human being again.

The big, big, big lesson here is one I seem to get smacked with every once in a while. That one is: I can’t do this all myself. Of course, Simpli has long since grown from being just me. But again, this week, I tried to do it all myself, and make sure Russ was protected from the insanity that was going on. But it’s not my job to decide when Russ has had too much stress — I have to trust that he will tell me when he’s too overwhelmed to continue. And I have to trust my own instincts that tell me who to hire and where to go with Simpli. And sometimes–just sometimes–it’s okay to think about my own personal needs instead of constantly putting everyone else first. 😉

Here’s to next week. May it be a big step in the right direction. I (and Simpli) could definitely use that right now.

That’s what is going through my mind.

Today, October 27, 2005, I am proud to say we hit our revenue goal for 2005.

My little company, which I started with just $15,000, has now made over half a million dollars in revenue during its 4-year lifespan.

And if this keeps up, I’ll be writing in less than 12 months about how we made $1 million in revenue total. We’ve tripled in size since 2004.

It’s unbelievable. It’s amazing. And I am seriously overwhelmed at how far this tiny business that I started as a side project has come. So a huge THANK YOU!!!!!!!!! goes out to all of you who are reading this and who are Simpli customers, as well as to those of you who supported me even when I really thought I was either going to have to sell the company or lose my mind. Yep, I have had some of those moments. But I pulled through and became a stronger person because of it.

We’ve come a long way, baby. And it only gets better from here! Here’s to 2006…and beyond!

I cheated a bit on that last blog, didn’t I? I haven’t really been updating lately because, frankly, I’ve been exhausted.

The good news is that last month was the best month ever in terms of revenue for Simpli. The bad news is that this month has a lot to live up to. While October 2004 was better than September 2004 by a large margin, the fact that we got a single large ($7400) order last month means we’re going to be hard-pressed to beat our September ’05 numbers this month. We’ve beaten the previous month in revenue every month except April this year, and that was because we had a $12,000 order in March. Our revenue graphs show a beautiful up-sloping curve for 2005, and I want that to continue.

To that end, I put up a sale for some dedicated servers on WebHostingTalk (a popular website for those looking for hosting) last week. It was our first WHT post for several months, and it generated massive publicity for Simpli. It garnered over 900 views and has given us 7 new customers so far. That’s 7 new dedicated server customers in 10 days, which means building servers, installing OSes, and dealing with a lot of questions (there are always configuration details that need to be settled when a customer orders a new server.) That’s in addition to our current customers, who (as always) are wanting to expand with more servers, more colo space, and more bandwidth! And it’s also in addition to Brandon leaving and Russ having to take on an entirely new role as lead system administrator.

All of this adds up to a hell of a massive workload, especially when you factor in Russ having to learn all of our system setup procedures and build new servers for customers who want them online now. I’ve actually started taking 2-4 hours a day to do support requests and make runs to our distributor. I could have posted another WHT ad this week, but wanted to give our staff a chance to catch their breath and actually be able to work on issues other than those requiring urgent attention.

I am a stress ball. I had nightmares last night and today I woke up in a horrible, overstressed mood where I felt like I hadn’t slept at all. Not healthy. The stress ball factor originates from me having to pull 12 or 14-hour days as well as driving Russ to work since he doesn’t have a car currently. To that end, today I told Russ to get a bike and take it to the light rail to work until he could get a car. That made me feel a lot better.

I knew I’d be a stress ball for a couple weeks, but I’m quickly realizing that all of these new customers add up to only one thing, and that is the fact that we have to hire someone else. Let’s look at this from a rational perspective. Brandon was pulling 12-hour days probably 2 days out of the week even when Ben was able to work full-time during the summer. Now that Ben’s back down to 20 hours a week, we simply aren’t able to get everything done. In fact, Russ has been pulling 12-to-14-hour days this week and Ben was here for about 25 hours total this week, and we’re still behind on tickets. Since the summer, when Ben cut back his hours, we’ve also added more than 20 new customers, who take up additional support time.

I’ve been reluctant to add staff since Simpli is in debt and I’d like to pay that off before hiring again, but if I don’t hire in the next 2-3 weeks, we’re going to be at a point where we won’t be able to take on any new customers because of the support requirements. In fact, in some way, I feel like we’re already at that point, since I didn’t feel comfortable putting our latest promotions on WHT this week due to staff overload. I don’t feel like I should shortchange my business and deny it growth because I don’t want to hire anyone else. After all, the more revenue we have, the more quickly we’re going to be able to clear the debt load and start doing really fun things with our profit (instead of just paying it back to our creditors.)

So the hiring-and-interview show will probably commence in the next 14 days, and we’ll be running down the growth path again. Perhaps I’ll actually be able to sleep well again by that point. 😉