Tim Hussey sent me an email this morning telling me about a project he is working on called Pixifi.

Tim is a part time wedding photographer (as well as being a professional designer/developer) and after getting sick of using a combination of Outlook, Excell and Word to manage his clients he thought something needed to be done. Strangely enough this is how most really useful web applications come about, someone is in need of it, so they make it.

Tim was nice enough to let me have a look around an early version of Pixifi today and I was generally impressed. I could see how it would be a valuable resource for any freelance photographer looking fir an easy way to manage their work load. What impressed me even more was that Tim has designed and developed this entire thing himself. From the ground up. It’s very rare to find someone who can both design and program exceptionally well. So, to date he has spent $0 on the website. Although… (and this is a wonderful quote)

I had to sacrifice time with my wife and friends to start building it…
You can’t put a price on that kind of startup funding… it’s expensive unless you’re
willing to make the sacrifice in the beginning.

Below is a quick look at the app itself.

Simplebucket is a site taking a shot at the image hosting throne. After playing around with the system for a few minutes I can say that i honestly think is stands a very good chance of making some waves within the space.

Along with having all the generic features that we’ve come to expect from image hosts it has a few real “killer” features that are worth checking out. One of the main benefits with this service is the ability to “tag” your pictures facebook / flickr style. While this itself is nothing new, SimpleBucket allows you to embed this tagged picture in blogs and websites.

This will be an incredibility useful feature for any blogger who posts images on a regular basis. I exchanged a few emails with the Khang, the owner today and he told me that soon you will also be able to record voice clips and include them in your embedded image (using the snapvine API).

To date Khang has only spent $180 on this for the domain name and web hosting. However developing and designing the entire thing yourself can help you save a lot of startup capital. 😉

This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

As the title suggests, vorolo is a new social networking website currently still in private beta.

Right now, vorolo is a one man band run by Jason Rai. Being a serial designer Jason managed to considerably keep the cost of development down designing the entire website himself. On top of that he spent $700 on the website programming. (According to Jason he would have quoted someone around $1,500 for all of the design work).

Today i was lucky enough to get an early look through the site and system.

The main problem Jason is going to face will be trying to build up the sites userbase. With the social networking market so saturated with large, established players it’ll be interesting to see how quickly this site grows.

I managed to get my hands on 20 beta invites. There is still a bit more work to be done on the site before it’s ready but when it’s good to go i’ll post the invites up here.

Edit: The updates are good to go. Leave a comment if you want one and i’ll send it over.

Easyautosales.com is a new startup in the world of buying and selling cars.

Wei, one of the three current owner originally discovered the issues of online auto sales after one of his friends tried to buy a car through Craigslist and received over 30 scam responses. He figured there had to be a better way. On the web there are already a number of great destinations for finding autos but there hasn’t been one that combined the technology of large classified sites with the free to sell models. While Craigslist is free, the technology really isn’t all that great for car buyers.

EasyAutoSales.com is a free, ad-supported autos service that helps private sellers and dealers sell cars online. They want to change the way cars are offered on the web vs. current methods. On top of allowing both private sellers and dealers to list all of their cars completely free on Easy Auto Sales and post unlimited pictures, they also wanted to help advertisers segment and reach their target audience within the online automotive crowd.

For example, it’s easy to say Person X went to an autos site therefore he’s interested in buying cars – let’s throw a bunch of car related ads at him and hope it sticks. It’s much more effective to segment Person X and figure out if he’s trying to buy cars under $5,000 or a new car and present the appropriate ads.

Wei is currently living off of tax refunds and money he received from selling his last startup. His personal runway is about 5 months long (which means he has about two months left before he has to make some tough decisions). Wei and his team work from their various homes and they’re Mac based.

He had contracted the development of his UI, which took about a month to build. The actual development time for programming was about 2.5 months from mid January to March of 2008. The site just launched its beta on March 21st and they still have a lot of kinks to work out. However, it would appear the constant whipping of the team to do their very best has had some positive effect – they garnered 50,000 cars within just one week of launch.

Investments:

Each of the three co-founders have promised to put in $5,000 a piece to pool their seed money. Since they’re limited on funds, they’ve solved a number of problems using VERY creative solutions instead of just throwing money at it and hope it goes away.

They’ve spent about $5,500 on outsourced coding but their primary goal was to just get a product out – regardless of how buggy or incomplete it was.

I’ve yet to see a perfectly coded site launch that was guaranteed success. However, I have seen and worked on a number of failed startups because they never launched waiting for perfection.

About $1,000 was spent on logo design and website design. Contrary to their past startups, they found the best person for each job and only gave them that job.

It’s much better to pay a logo guru for a logo design and a guru at graphics/CSS/xhtml for UI design then to try and find someone who is mediocre at both and expect them to do a great job at everything. The same goes for programming – if you outsource, don’t limit yourself to one firm for database work, code, UI design, logo, etc. Find the best for each and give them all different tasks.

They haven’t spent a dime on promotion thus far. In total, they’ve spent less than $8,000 – a good chunk is actually for food at Panera, where they meet weekly thanks to their free Wifi.

Easy Auto Sales is currently making limited revenue, so that’s obviously something they’ll have to work out in the near future.

Feel free to check out their company blog, at ComefortheRide.com.

I’ve been reading a few blogs lately, particularly posts entailing the costs and procedures of a new start-up. There seems to be a growing trend of minimizing start-up costs and times, and I think it is great that entrepreneurs are finally learning of the many places and ways to downsize their investments to get a start-up running. (Keep an eye out for a friskily controversial new post we’ll have coming up on this topic).

But here’s something that caught my eye, an excerpt from Guy Kawasaki’s side of ‘da net’:

$4,824.14. The total cost of the legal fees [for Truemors] was $4,824.14. I could have used my uncle the divorce lawyer and saved a few bucks, but that would have been short sighted if Truemors ever becomes worth something. Here’s a breakdown of what I got for this amount of money.

Now before I go on, do know that what Guy dropped nearly $5 grand on was more than just a “Terms of Use” agreement (see here), but for the sake of this post I’ll be focusing on what’s out there.

First of all, do you really need something like a Terms of Use, or a Non-Disclosure Agreement to protect your start-up? Let’s take a look at what can happen, and what good one can do for you.

Hypothetical, disadvantageous situation:

There’s far too great of a variety of websites and services offered on the internet to list specifics for each type of situation, but to make my point, I’ll use a content sharing / storage service. Call it StartupX. Imagine this, you have no acceptable use policy (aka, a Terms of Service, or a Terms of Use), and you’re running a successful marketing campaign. A flurry of new users sign up, and life is good. Then you notice a few illicit files being uploaded, and oh baby take my word for it – these files are viral. By the time you go and check out what these users are up to, this trend will catch on. Since the users didn’t agree to anything prior to creating their account, they go wild.

Imagine by nightfall, your server has copyright infringement written all over it, with thousands of mp3’s, ripped or unreleased movies, and more. You wake up the next morning to find your inbox flooded with hundreds of cease and desist letters, take-down notices, and legal threats from the likes of the RIAA, the MPAA, and independent producers. You’ve dropped some dollar on your site (or worse, you’ve raised a few grand from angel investors, but then again this article isn’t about those ventures), and you really hate to see it go down. You’ve seen what organizations like the RIAA have done to other sites. That’s not you.

But what can you do? StartupX didn’t require, or even give users the choice, of accepting and abiding to a Terms of Service (because it doesn’t exist). You, as whole representative of StartupX, can’t ride on the fact that the user’s are to blame… and now, not their server, but your server, houses thousands of infringed content. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe this makes you the one responsible for these files. And now, you have no choice but to shut down your service, all because you couldn’t shell out the $5,000 in legal fees to cover a Terms of Service (Admittedly, though, this could be taken to trial, which would just mean more fiscal duties). But hey, look at the bright side, chances are StartupX just made some big headlines in the blogosphere.

So what can be done to prevent this kind of situation from ever arising on your field? Plenty. Of course the statement implying one needs to spend $5,000 to obtain a viable Terms of Service (above) is a joke – a ToS, and plenty of other legal forms and agreements, can easily be found all over the internet for a one time fee of $0. (Now this doesn’t go without saying, if you’ve raised capital, or are planning to launch a large service that needs to be scalable, hiring a lawyer to consult and write your agreements for your start-up is the best way to go). I’d like to end this post by providing a few useful links to free legal templates that are out there for your use. 🙂

Terms of Service

• http://www.docstoc.com/docs/301241/Website-Standard-Terms-and-Conditions-Template
• http://partners.uslegalforms.com/partners/blumberg/index.php?a=tech-forms.htm
• http://www.businessballs.com/service_agreements_contracts_templates.htm
• http://www.lawdepot.com/contracts/service-contract/?ad=mainpag

Non-Disclosure Agreement (Good when outsourcing development, design work, or other services that you may want to keep on ‘the down lo’, or may need to reveal some figures to)

• http://fap.wharton.upenn.edu/forms/nondisclosure.htm
• http://my.execpc.com/~mhallign/form1.html
• http://www.docstoc.com/docs/14660/Web-Site-Design-Nondisclosure-Agreement
• http://ezinearticles.com/?Mutual-Non-Disclosure-Agreement-Template&id=350378
• http://www.coollawyer.com/webfront/freeconf/interactive.php

Privacy Policy (Good when requiring personal or private information from your users)

• http://www.docstoc.com/docs/14623/Web-Site-Privacy-Policy
• http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml
• http://www.enbs.com/privacy-policy-generator.php

And finally, if you’d like to Incorporate or set up a(n?) LLC, or trademark your name, the most recommended place around is LegalZoom.

If you enjoyed this post please feel free to comment, or share it (check out the “SHARE” button below this post).

Update: A few commenters have brought to my attention that the example situation I described may be a little too extreme, so maybe its best not to take the story too seriously, as one would still be protected under various laws or acts in the US (EG. The DMCA). The goal of this post was to remind entrepreneurs about the importance of legal work for your start-up. I loved the great discussion through the comments, by the way.