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• Posted by Chris Holt on 05/03 at 10:25 AM
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
We've been crazy busy!
We just participated in Women's Demo Night, sponsored by New York Tech Meetup and Change The Ratio. You can read all about our well-received pitch here!
That experience caused us to go live with a not-quite-finished product at clearhealthcosts.com, but the splash we made was exciting enough to the audience that we got a pitch spot scheduled for Sept. 11.
It's the best startup publicity you can get in New York. Here we are on their front page: http://nytm.org/
Whew!
We're also in the process of branching out! We've got an easy cookbook for expanding to other cities, and we're looking for partners! We have partnerships in the making in various cities (Boston, maybe Washington, NYC, a southern state I can't name right now), and a lot of interest from other quarters. An NYC venture firm reached out to us, and while I don't think we will be their cup of tea -- too early! too embryonic! -- it's nice to be invited to meetings.
Now that we've made a tool that is ready for partnerships, we're currently looking for anyone who might be a good partner for things like consulting, eyeballs, revenue, and data collection. Any recommendations people have would be great! Introductions welcome!
• Posted by Jeanne Pinder on 09/04 at 11:13 AM
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Web site design is really complicated. This is both obvious and not so obvious.
When I launched ClearHealthCosts, I had no experience in building Web sites or hiring developers. It's called on-the-job training.
Right out of the box, I got a bid of $20,000 to build the site. I didn't take it -- that would have eaten up the entire first grant that we won, and I would have been dead in the water.
I have a friend who did pay $20,000 for a web site, and he's happy with it. (He works at a completely grant-funded nonprofit.)
What did I do? Hemmed and hawed, researched, thought, thought some more, and did a bunch of reporting. I'm a journalist after all. Then I decided to design it myself. How hard can it be? I've used the Web, I should be able to design for it.
Building it was another story: should it be on Drupal, Joomla, WordPress?
Sometimes in this world it seems like every step is a mistake. How many times has someone looked at you, a startup entrepreneur, shaking his head and saying "But you have to build it on Drupal." Or "Don't use green. Green never works." Or "Your business model won't work." All with the sense of complete certainty.
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