We’ve all heard the stories in colourful business magazines about people starting their multimillion dollar companies using nothing more than their credit cards as funding.

It sounds like a cool idea and all and it could probably be used as a gamble if you are betting on receiving a large amount of cashflow straight away. However the monthly burn rate you will have if you dont have oodles of cashflow straight away is one of those things to remove the focus of the business that I just can not recommend.

My mantra is as always focus on the business. Having an extra $1000 more burnrate monthly as you might get if you hit the cards, makes it so much more difficult to hit break even. This means you start worrying about money and not on building your business.

It’s a very similar anti pattern to the perpetual business plan anti pattern. It is always easier to survive or seek funding if your business is going albeit small. But it is almost impossible to do either no matter how good your business plan if you don’t focus on your business.

Due to major hassle with respect to Internet Explorers buggy support for Cascading Style Sheets, I wont be supporting Internet Explorer during the beta version of StakeItOut.

You will be able to login, but things will look strange and will likely be unusable.

I recommend using Firefox as an Internet Explorer replacement:

I have now added editing of assets within the portfolio page using ajax.

You can currently edit the title and/or tags of each asset.

Still need to be able to edit web service settings to select which actions to allow on a web service.

Also bear in mind that the tag list does currently not get updated, when you edit the tags of an asset or add an asset via the “Add..” button.

During the Reboot 7 conference one of the most interesting sessions was Jason Fried from 37Signals titled “Doing big things with small teams”.

It is the story how they have managed to roll out:

• Basecamp
• Tada-list
• Backpack

Using very few resources and quickly. It was basically a tale of bootstrapping successfull commercial web services.

Much of what he said runs along the same thread that I have been pushing here. In fact there was really very little I would be in disagreement with.

The main things that where enlightening for me was their tech support strategy. Jason does most of the techsupport for all of their sites himself. If someone has a suggestion he replies back to them thanking them for the idea and immediately deletes the mail. If enough people suggest a feature it will be memorable enough that it will make it on the todo list.

He also stressed the importance of leaving applications as simple as possible, allowing people to structure things their own way and not imposing structures upon them.

Several people asked him if they didn’t want to grow bigger. He replied that currently that would not be a priority for them as that would take the enjoyment out of it. I am absolutely in violent agreement with this.

The reboot participang notes from Jason’s session

Thanks to John and Peter Lindberg I fixed a problem where new users where not allowed to login a second time.

This was definitely causing me some grief, because when things are encrypted it can be very difficult to debug this. It turned out to be a missing timestamp, that was the culprit.