April 10, 2007

How to Start a Company Without an IT Guy...

Posted by Curt Finch at 4:30 PM

Have you ever noticed that IT guys are grumpy? Partly I think that's because they never get calls like this:

"Hey Scott, just called to say everythings working ok today and you're a great guy!"

The calls are typically more like this:

"Hey Scott, Have you ever noticed that your spam filter pretty much only filters out our sales leads? But luckily it does let all the Viagra ads through which is good because it gives us something to think about while we're not selling anything. Did they have classes in spam filtering at the college you supposedly went to?"

His only possible answers to this tirade are either:

1. "Shut up."
2. "Colleges don't teach that, unfortunately."

It's kinda like being a fireman. You can never respond to the fire fast enough no matter what you do.

If I was starting a company today I wouldn't even buy a server. I would really try to neither be nor hire an IT guy. I'd do everything SaaS - online - hosted - whatever you want to call it (noone can seem to agree on a name for it really).

I'd use Salesforce or Sugar for contact management, Quickbooks online for accounting. I'd outsource email to someone like Amicus (here in Austin) and document storage to someone - I don't know who - just Google for document management SaaS.

If I was starting a brand new company today I would really try to have no servers at all, thereby sailing pass the stale Linux/Windows debate, so that I could focus on serving my customers instead of building a bunch of technology infrastructure that is - at this point - redundant.

Servers require updates, maintenance, backups and more backups. And backups are a huge pain. Very few companies of any size do a good job with backups. Disks have gotten big faster than tapes have and this is causing a real problem. Where to put all the data? And all disk drives fail eventually. Lightening does strike.

After 10 years in business, I've seen a number of disk drives tank. And it is never ever convenient.

Ask yourself, seriously, if a tornado obliterated all your servers right now (or a pissed off employee), how long would it take you to get it all going again. How do you know the tapes will work? And where are they? Not in the same room as the servers I hope?

Did you know that tapes sometimes can be written to but not read from due to the technology of the tape drive and the error rate on the tape itself?

Are those machines still for sale so you can buy replacements for the ones the tornado ate? Where would you get that copy of the OS you were running now? How many quadzillions of ludicrous patches from Microsoft did it have on it again? And how long would it take to install them?

But wait a minute. "What if a tornado destroys the SaaS site of my chosen vendor?" you ask.

You tricky reader you. That's a great question.

Well I happen to have an answer for that one. We have hundreds of customers who run their business on our SaaS site. If I wasn't up and running pretty much immediately after such an event i'd be out of business and living under a bridge. Moreover some of those customers would come and find me under that bridge and kill me. And I'd be defenseless because I'd have sold off all my guns to buy crack by that point. When you're really depressed and living under a bridge after losing everything I'm guessing you need alot of crack just to get by.

Anyway that frightening vision is very motivating to me. So we have redundant hardware, lots of backups, tapes in a saltmine, multiple sites for data, etc. But sometimes I still don't sleep much.

No one can do a better job keeping our app up and running than we can.

"But what if someone nefarious and evil steals my data and gives it to my competitor - or my mother?" you ask...

The bank has all your data and you aren't scared of them giving it away. What's the dif? What about the phone company? They know alot about you. SaaS companies should just be under the same constraints for protecting your company's privacy as banks and telephone firms.

And so far they all seem to be doing a fine job. I've heard zero reports of anyone swiping a competitor's sales leads out of Salesforce, for example, and they have alot of customers. Like a bazillion or so I think.

If you're starting a new company today, go SaaS. Get a laptop. Office at Starbucks. If your time, your data security, and your piece of mind is worth anything, it's definitely cheaper.

Curt Finch - CEO of Journyx

60 Comments

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