The Kindle

What should I buy for Christmas has been up for a few days now, and we've blown almost all our £100 free adwords already. On the upside, we've sold a Kindle. On the downside, that's about it, and we've taken about £10 in revenue in total.

In an effort to eke out the remaining £10 ad budget, I've just tried dropping our maximum bid on Adwords - I'd intended to just blow the budget we had, which was fine - the free spend runs out today. But I've realised that if we can get clicks at the price we're now bidding, it might just become viable to keep on spending.. fingers crossed for that one!

And finally, a quick email to Nuts magazine. I'll drop a second to one of my old colleagues later, I think, who has a contact or two in the media. It's got to be worth a shot!

WTFXmas - The beginnings

This time last week I was packing up my desk - today I'm frantically playing with Twitter, Facebook, Digg and all the rest, trying to generate traffic for our new little venture.

Mark and I had originally planned to work with another guy, Nic, who'd done this sort of thing before. Unfortunately for us, he got accepted into YCombinator last week, so in the downtime while we figure out what to do, we set up a Christmas affiliate website - www.wtfshouldibuyforxmas.com . It's a way to get Mark back into coding, and to teach both of us how to market ourselves online.

Lessons learned so far:

1. Go for it. You might as well do something other than sit around. The only money we've had to spend is on domain names. Heroku offer a free Rails hosting package - it won't be enough if we start to get much traffic, but hopefully by then we'll be making money. I had £100 of free Adwords to use too, so we've got some coverage on Google
2. The Great is the Enemy of the Good. Actually, I already knew this one. We know our site's not perfect, but we also know we have to get it out now. So we have something that's okay, and a lot of useful feedback for improvements if we get a chance to make them
3. Marketing is the hardest bit. Maybe we already figured that out. But build it in from the start - from day 1, make sure your Facebook page is set up, and make sure your mates are Liking that, rather than the URL itself. Think about who you can tap up, and how you might be able to get press. I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up filming my cats doing something silly and putting it on Youtube, with a link to WTFXmas in order to get more traffic. At the same time, make sure you ask your friends - clicking a button on Facebook is hardly an imposition, and if they don't do so, you know there's something wrong with your idea.
4. Don't spend money until you've validated your idea. Admittedly we had to buy a domain name. But I know we won't be spending another penny until we've got some purchases rolling in.
5. Have fun. It's kind of cool that 200 people so far today have chosen to spend time on my website, even if we don't get the affiliate commission figures through until tomorrow!

Back to the grind though - those forums won't astroturf themselves...