Digging my own Ditch

Archive for the ‘Aroxo’ Category

A step-by-step guide to starting up

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

Ok, so you’ve got an idea, you’ve got a limited budget and you want to start your own company. To keep control of costs you’ve decided to off-shore the development. Now what do you do? How do you go from idea to launched system?

In this post I’ll detail your first steps towards launch. By the end of it you’ll know how to build a mock-up of your business idea and write the most important document you’ll write for the company: your functional specification.

For a simple system this process should take you a month. For a complex build there will be a lot more research and your mock-up and functional specification will be big, budget 3 months of full-time work.

You may also find it useful to look at my overview of starting-up post, first in this series.

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Posted in Aroxo, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, how to start, off-shoring, out-sourcing, start-up | No Comments »

How to boot-strap your start-up

Wednesday, September 12th, 2007

The aim of many entrepreneurs is to take a business idea and convert it into a professional and functioning business on a low budget. This is typically called “bootstrapping” and it is fraught with potential pitfalls and dangers, but when done well can really help get a company going fast, professionally and without the founders having to give up much (if any) equity or bankrupting themselves.

Over the next 5-6 posts I’ll outline the process which I’ve now followed at several corporates and which I’ve honed to work with my own start-up, Aroxo. I’ll discuss what skills you’ll need, how to write your requirements, how to source developers and designers, how much to budget, how to agree a development contract, how to manage your vendors, how plan your release, all the documentation which you need and much more.

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Posted in Aroxo, business, development, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, how to start, india, off-shoring, out-sourcing, start-up, web 2.0 | No Comments »

Has eBay stopped bidding on auctions?

Tuesday, August 21st, 2007

Techcrunch recently reported that eBay lost $1bn of market cap. Combining this with reports from some sellers that “eBay is broken“, it is clear that it’s time to take a closer look at just what is happening with eBay.

Firstly, some facts sourced from eBay’s quarterly reports:

eBay’s subscriber activity rate has declined from 41% in Q1 2005 to 35% in Q2 2007
after a few quarters of fast decelerating growth, the number of listings it carries has actually fallen 6% in Q2 2007 (compared to Q2 2006)
the average cost of a listing has risen from $1.72 in Q2 2006 to $2.31 Q2 2007 – a 35% rise
eBay has announced it is launching a range of user-generated content services (such as blogs and wikis) as well as filling a few proposition gaps by launching services such as Gumtree and “kijiji” in the US market.

The chart below details some of this.

Selected eBay operating metrics

My source data is available here.

Before I go on, an important disclosure

I am a co-founder of Aroxo which will be a major eBay competitor when we launch in October 2007. I’ve sourced all the data above directly from eBay, although I have performed some calculations on these data myself. You can see what I’ve done here.

With that in mind, what follows are my opinions based on what I see happening in the market.

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Posted in Aroxo, auctions, business, ebay, seller | 3 Comments »

How we started our business

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Over the course of the last two weeks I’ve started work on a new business (parallel running with Aroxo) and it occurred to me that getting to the point of starting the vendor selection process, from idea conception took around 10 working days. For Aroxo this process took something like 1 year.

I confess that when we were starting Aroxo I was working fulltime and so I only had evenings and weekends to spend on the business, but this does not explain the increased efficiency. This extra speed comes directly from the experience of launching Aroxo, quite simply for the new business I followed a tried and tested process which I’d already put through its paces for Aroxo (and other projects).

The process which I am about to describe is directly targetted at launching a business which is “bootstrapped” (i.e. self-funded) and where as much of the work creating the business is out-sourced. The process rough is:

Development process

Over the next series of posts I will detail precisely what we did at each stage, focusing in much more detail on what information was needed to get each stage started and what to look for from the output. I’ll provide examples for each of the stages and make it clear where it is possible to skip certain stages or where the process might differ for different project structures.

I’ve no doubt that others adopt different processes and I’m happy to carry comments to capture these differences and would appreciate everyone’s feedback.

Posted in Aroxo, business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, start-up, web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Aroxo is getting started!

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

I have some great news to share. After leaving fulltime employment just over a week ago, Aroxo has taken a very important step towards reaching the market.

Yesterday we reached a major milestone and I wanted to share the news with you. We have signed a development contract with an off-shore development company and we are leaving for India tonight to begin the development process. The functional specification is at the printers.

I am personally really excited to be starting the development process and can’t wait to be able to show you more of what we’ve been working on. Our next steps when we’re back we will be to start the patent drafting process, select our site designers and begin work on our detailed marketing plan.

We can’t reveal too much yet as the patent hasn’t been filed, but to give you a little more detail – we’re launching a new online trading exchange, behind it will be an entirely new way of buying and selling – something which has not been done before in the consumer space. You’ll be able to use Aroxo to buy and sell a range of tens of thousands consumer products at extremely competitive prices.

There’s much more to come, watch this space…

Posted in Aroxo, announcement, development, entrepreneur, india, out-sourcing, start-up, web 2.0 | No Comments »