This is going to be a unique two part post in no particular order, but I'll start with the PHP part first. At the beginning of the year, I dropped Blogger in favor of WordPress. I did this for a couple of reasons, but the biggest one was that I wanted to get a better understanding of PHP. When I told my friends this, they all said, 'Why on earth would a sales guy want to learn PHP?' The answer at the time, and still is, two-fold (following the parts & folds? It's going to get confusing).
First, a big chunk of Yahoo's services are based on PHP and I abhor when I hear engineers tell sales guys that something can't be done. I love understanding technology to the point where I can call bullshit on an engineer and explain, from a high level why something can be done. I also am certain that understanding technology helps me be a better technology sales person because I can explain solutions at a dumbed down sales guy kind of level. I also find that it helps bridge the divide between sales and engineering. A little street cred if you know what I mean.
The second reason that I wanted to learn PHP was that I come up with all kinds of crazy ideas for things that could make a decent long tail business. Not millions, but beer money. The problem with beer money is that it is hard to get an engineer excited about building something that is only going to generate beer money. Thus, I wanted to learn PHP, a bit of JavaScript, some more HTML and a bit of MySQL so that when I get these goofy ideas, I can build them myself.
Which takes me to the second part. My friend Beave has been one of my closest friends since we played little league in 3rd grade. We both quickly learned that being in 3rd grade and being a third string right fielder sucked and that being on a skateboard or BMX bike was multiples more fun. We've both always been semi-entrepreneurial and started a business in 8th grade publishing a fan zine that had pictures of local skaters, freestylers and record reviews. SaB-Zine. We printed it on my moms photo copier when she was at meetings. We traded advertising from the local skate shop in exchange for distribution and sold 10 copies at $1 a piece. We were rich!!! We took our profits to McDonalds and ate like kings. I don't remember what we did with the money from the second issue, but I think that we sold 10 or 15 copies of that too.
Since BMXing and Skateboarding typically begets punk rock music, we've both had a love for punk rock since the 6th or 7th grade. Ever since then, we've always wanted to start another little company to make McDonalds money for us (but neither of us eat at McDonalds anymore, so we need WholeFoods money now). I'm happy to announce now, that we have launched
PunkRockIdol.com
While this isn't the most complex of sites ever built, it is my first foray into building applications that are a bit more complicated than my K2 script. More importantly, 9 months ago, I would have had no idea how to do this. The idea is simple, get punk rock bands to submit their videos and have an online talent show where users vote on the best video. We've met a bunch of cool people from the punk rock scene over the years and have recruited a lot of them to be guest judges. We've done a ton of homework on how to distribute music online without a major label. We've built a MySpace page and are experimenting with all types of marketing on MySpace. We are planning on launching the site in September. Keep an eye out for it.
I'm especially thankful that I have
Justin,
Paul,
Jesse and Jon as references for when I really got into a jam.
