The Business Plan

It took me a good long time to diligently put together a business plan for List Central. I’ve been stubborn about wanting to Bootstrap this project, and have no intention of look for funding. The initial costs are coming out of my pocket, and I’m keeping them as low as I can until List Central starts earning it’s keep.

The fact that I will not be approaching potential investors does not negate the need for a business plan, it does, however, change the role of the document. In many ways writing my business plan, without investors in mind, made the task much easier. I was free to focus on the conponents of the document that are integral to planning and executing the business, rather than worry about what will impress. There was no need for me to follow some externally established standard on what a business plan should be. It was just me writing out the parameters of my business.

I recommend all other entreprenuers put in the time to put together a business plan. It really does help in organizing your thoughts and outlining a direction.  The process of writing a business plan forces you to face some big questions, mainly ‘How will the whole money thing work?’. A sometimes daungting questions, which needs to be addressed nonetheless. The end product serves as a valuable point of reference to return to when you need reminders. I find it useful to reread the plan every few weeks to ensure I’m still on track, and to make any adjustments to the plan that are required as a result of change… you can always bet on change!

In writing the business plan for List Central I knew that I had to include certain components in order to write something that would be valuable to me, but beyond that, I did really know how to proceede. So I went to the Small Business BC website and perused their sample business plans. From that I was able to come up with a suitable outline of the sections I needed for my plan. After that, all I had to do was fill in the sections.

Every business plan is different, as each represents it’s own business in a particular phase. It may be tempting to copy another business plan to get it out of the way, but really, doing this robs the entreprenuer of a valuable opportunity to really delve into the aims of his or her business, and bring the tough questions up to the surface. Every business would only benefit from it’s entreprenuer devoting time to write a business plan devoted to it, no matter the size or industry of the business, nor the intended audience of the plan.

FAILblog

The FAILblog is funnier than that video of that monkey drinking his own pee! I’d like to thank the good folks over at the Cheezeburger Network for allowing me to incorporate their images in List Central’s error pages. When List Central FAILs, you’ll see more than a FailWhale, you’ll see a randomly selected FAIL image from the FAILblog.

If you’ve got some time to kill, head over to the FAILblog… it’ll make you laugh!

Sometimes I feel like the only adult at the playground, desperately trying, in vein, to get the kids to play nice, but they refuse to do so!

I love CPAN! There is no other library like it. So well organized, incredibly comprehensive, and an amazingly large contributor base. It is beautiful for the code and for the community.

I love Debian! The best of all Linux distributions, Debian offers usability to the Linux community, even to the server maintainers, and for the most part, applications just plain work when installed via the apt package manager.

In the last year or two its become clear the CPAN and Debian should be put on naughty spots or some other such punishment as their interaction has made me, a long time user of both, very frustrated. I recently started renting a dedicated server from ServerPronto in preparation for the upcoming release of List Central. This required that I build a new Debian machine to have all of the applications and modules that I like to use. Everything was going beautifully until I reached the task of installing my 3rd party Perl modules. I’ve been a Perl programmer for quite a few years now, so my instinct was to go to CPAN and install via the command line. Over and over again the installation of my modules, ones that work perfectly on my home server, failed, with very lengthy and arcane error messages. Through much googling and trail and error I found the answer in pre-built Debian packages that are to be installed via the apt package manager that provide my much loved Perl modules. It took 2 frustrating days to figure out which CPAN modules had a corresponding Debian package to install, and which needed CPAN.

The effort to bring CPAN and Debian into sync is evident in this migration of Perl modules to Debian packages, but it misses the mark. As with many open source projects it seems that the developers have once again forgotten about the user. Why does CPAN burp up a bunch of garbage when I try to install modules that have Debian packages to install instead? Would it really be too hard to have CPAN figure out that I’m on Debian, and tell me that there is a package that I should be installing instead?

Linux is growing in popularity, and Debian (with Ubuntu) is at the forefront.  Communication with the user has to be made a priority, or else frustrations like this one are likely to cause people to go back to the alternatives they are used to.

For all of those interested, I thought I’d describe the setup of my server that is home to what will be List Central.

List Central runs on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, mySQL, and Perl) server. As List Central is still under development, I’ve done my best to use all of the most current stable versions of everything. The details are below:

• Debian Etch
• Apache2 (mpm-prefork) Version 2.2
• mySQL 5.0
• Perl 5.8.8
• Mod_perl: libapache2-mod-perl2 Version2.0.2-2.4
• Apache Request Library: libapache2-mod-apreq2 Version 2.08-4
• PHP 5 installed for WordPress

I am quite happy with my current setup, though I’ll admit that it took me years to get comfortable being a Linux server administrator. Feel free to ask system related questions here.  Discussions between those whom have similar setups are very welcome!