Idea

The booming real estate markets of the late 90′s and early 00′s inspired many (especially those who had been involved in the industry) to start seeing dollar signs. As more people were buying and building homes, more appraisals and inspections were ordered. In case you haven’t been around anyone who does appraisal work, you should know that the research and comparison pieces of the report consume large chunks of time. 

There was a point in time where to get information about lots, land and peoples homes, you would have to physically go to the county assessors office and look through the stock piles of records, plat maps etc. to find you comparable properties in order to base your valuation. All of this information is publicly available and one just needs to go ask to see it. 

It didn’t take long for a few companies to spring up with the idea that they would aggregate all this data, and they did it well enough to make a pretty solid business out of it. However, the distribution of this data via companies like the MLS at that time were on CD’s which you received regularly and had to load onto your computer (I’m sure they still have this as an option) but Mr. Teacher had the idea that it would be much more convenient if people could just access all this data via the Internet. 

Stack

Incase you were wondering about the technology stack we were using to build this, it was as follows:
Apache Web Server, PHP3, MYSQL. Your standard LAMP stack, but before it was your “standard LAMP stack”.

Pitfalls

I must admit, that when I accepted this gig I really had no idea what I was getting into. I made promises that I wasn’t completely confident about, ultimately my lack of experience didn’t turn out to be the killer.

• For a site like this to succeed we would need many counties worth of data
• Data needs to be kept up to date (picking up CD’s all over the state every other day is unreasonable)
• Provided data was not in a reliable format
• CD’s full of 100 meg comma delimited files are difficult to work with
• Building a web based competitor to the MLS by yourself when you are 16 is rather daunting

To expand a bit on the above, even after I had a site designed, user logins working, profiles working, and the first round of data for each county searchable I still hadn’t even reached the bulk of the work. At this point my method was to create a PHP script for each file’s particular format and parse through it doing DB inserts. Since the format of each file (even new files for counties I already supported) had changing formats, I was continually updating the scripts trying to make the exploded entries in the arrays match up to the DB columns etc.

Killer

When you are looking to jump into any market, you first need to take a look at the competition. What is going to keep them from squashing you like a bug. Think about it, they have resources, money, people and hopefully some insight into the market. It is much easier for them to create and deploy than it is for you, and they will, and they did.

Not too long after our 4th or 5th iteration of data and some testing, MLS announced their web based service. Around that same time, many smaller (already existing) companies in the real estate market announced that they would be doing the exact same thing.

We could have forged ahead, we had a working rough beta and with some serious persistence we could have built up a small user base by offering lower pricing… but that wasn’t my top concern. I believe that after my involvement tapered down, Mr. Teacher continued forging forward. A moment ago I checked the domain where the beta was available, and it’s no longer even registered. 

Lessons

• Do your market research
• If time is an issue, hire a reasonable size team
• Always get signed contracts (I’m pretty sure he still owes me money)

Conception
The original idea came from a trip to CompuCare to buy a bunch of computer parts for a machine I was building. I drug along a friend of mine and my parents probably have a better idea of when exactly this was — but I am going to guess the summer of 1997 or 1998. The idea was that if a place like CompuCare can build relationships with vendors and get all these great deals on computer why can’t we do that too?

Execution
I knew enough to know that there would be money involved, and the friend of mine happened to be pretty good with numbers, so we decided that he would handle all the money and I would handle all the computer stuff. Before I really knew what was going on, he had headed down to the city to apply for a business license. Another good friend of mine was knee deep in design as he cranked out an actually very attractive web site and the next thing we knew we had boxbay.com online and sorta ready for some attention. BoxBay of course coming from the fact that we lived right on Bellingham Bay, and that we would be selling computer ‘boxes’, sounds like reasonable logic to me! The garage at my house had tools, gardening equipment and a couple boats in it, but it was the summer so what would be a better time than to move everything out to make way for our new computer business. At this point we have a business license, a metal box with about 40 dollars in it, a nice to look at but otherwise useless web site, and absolutely nothing to sell. The next step was to mail off all kinds of things to hardware vendors so that we could get really kickin’ deals and sweep all of our competition off their feet. After signing up for all the whole sale programs the mail started arriving.

After the initial excitement of the free posters and stickers we got, we quickly realized that the only way we would get any deals on hardware was if we ordered it in bulk. The more we ordered the cheaper things would get by the unit. This is very simple stuff that you would think a couple smart high school freshman would have known at this point, but nothing drives the point home like a real world example.

Collapse
We collected hardware orders from everyone we knew, including going far over our budget for our personal ‘upgrades’ to our machines and were still somewhere around 195 orders short to get the very lowest discount a business could get. Somewhere around this point we sort of became bored of the whole thing, and had ‘hung out’ for too many long summer days in a row and it was now time to head off to something new and interesting. I have no idea what that was, but I do remember running around the neighborhood playing tag with roman candles (So that puts us in the ball park of the 4th of July for this whole endeavor).

Conclusion
Never go sign up for a business license until you really plan to do something with it. The thing costs money, they continually contact you and if you don’t take care of it you can wind up paying a bunch of fees. This will not be the last time in my career to make this exact mistake. We received mail for this dead computer company for many years after this, and as you can imagine my folks were not super happy to be the mailing address for anything ‘BoxBay Computers’ related that showed up at the house.

Additionally, a very important lesson I didn’t forget from this whole experience was that businesses cost money, doing business costs money, and making money costs money. This point came up daily, in almost every class I took while I was on the road to my BA in Business — but by that point I was fully prepped for that multiple choice question in Economics, Finance, Accounting, Entrepreneurship etc. wow, that makes me think school should actually make people try to start a business instead of… well that’s a story for another day.

Note

Coronix.net (I was really into Unix, and thought I liked Cervesa..) was even shorter lived than BoxBay, however in reality did have a much higher chance of survival — and it did for a few weeks

Coronix was going to be a Web Design company, that did custom web sites for every business in town. You are probably thinking ‘Oh man that market is flooded’, and it is, but it wasn’t in 1999. The web site was covered with images I had designed in Bryce 2, there was text jammed in between the massive images of completely out of context items including trees, rocks, probably a modeled waterfall I found in a tutorial and many kitchen appliances I found in free Bryce object files. There was a contact form that called a CGI and sent my hotmail account a completely unformatted string of inputs from the user.

I was the ‘web developer’ in that I knew how to use Dreamweaver, had learned HTML in 7th and 8th grade and considered myself a master. I also knew how to do roll over buttons with JavaScript, but really had no idea how it was possible to do what I was doing. Eventually this web site evolved into me downloading the entire source for the Microsoft.com web site at the time (which was baby blue, with JavaScript drop down menus to all their products) and CSS to make the hyperlinks change color. The bar across the top also rounded in the right corner — which I had to have.

Coronix died a peaceful death, as the domain expired the content stayed alive on a friends 9.99 a year hosting account until he forget to pay the bill. However during this period of time I did wind up doing about 5 web sites for people I knew in the area, and sparked my interest in CGI… which slowly evolved into PERL, then PHP and finally Python (also a story for another day). I would forever enjoy making money off of web sites, and making web sites for absolutely no money, reason or purpose other than my creative zing.

We will jump a few years into the future next time, and check out how facebook really did steal my idea.. no seriously they really did — I have a newspaper article written by the WSU news paper about this web site about 2 months before wsufacebook.com showed up! Okay okay, all that goes in the next entry, stay tuned.

At this point it looks unlikely that I will be going back and resurrecting these projects from the dead (especially at the rapidly evolving rate of change in todays technology industry). So I am going to start sharing them with the world, and if you have an inspiration — feel free to go ahead and use it. You can even feel free to send me huge gobs of money for the great idea I inspired..

My plan at this point is to start as far back as I can date wise, and do an entry a week on a different business (or variation of a business). This way I can recap what was good about them, what killed them, and maybe learn a bit from this whole process.

There are a few stealth things that I probably won’t be sharing, and many of these were in collaboration with other people so if I accidently post your inner most secret project you are still working on from seven years ago — please let me know.

To give you a small preview it looks like the next entry will be a few of my very early ventures lumped into one.. because when you are 15 it’s hard to concentrate on any one thing for too long. Upcoming startup recaps include (coronix.net and boxbay computers), stay tuned!