jamesmaskell.co.uk

Announcing Vinetrade!

james@jamesmaskell.co.uk (James Maskell) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:07:30 +0000

The past few weeks have been very busy. I've even forgotten to announce the launch of my new company on my blog. So here goes:

Vinetrade has now launched! Vinetrade is a platform for building and managing wine portfolios. The basic idea is that people can use it to buy and sell fine wine for consumption or investment.

I've been working closely with Mark McFarlane on the project since November. Mark came on board as one of the original investors and later graduated to be a co-founder alongside myself.

I had been thinking about an online exchange for wine following a year working in the industry. While the concept is not necessarily new, building something that is purely web based and accessible to all is. Investing in wine has previously been a lengthy and frustrating process with lots of manual communication and work involved. Vinetrade automates this and lets you manage your portfolio through one central service.

We still have a long way to go, but we're very excited for the future. 2012 is a great year to be starting a company in the UK and we're starting to take advantage of London's emerging startup culture.

I'm going to attempt to post more often to keep everyone updated on Vinetrade and share some of our startup experiences. In the mean time, check out the Vinetrade site and our iPhone app on the App Store.

Inspiration for Startup Founders

james@jamesmaskell.co.uk (James Maskell) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:49:10 +0000

Running a startup can be tough. There will always be setbacks and times when you struggle to see how things are going to work out. I've had that recently - particularly in the very early days (and we're still pre-launch) - but quotes from the following articles stuck in my mind and have helped to keep my motivated.

In a recently republished article, Seth Godin argues that you want to avoid looking back on missed opportunities. If you're currently running a startup, you should want to avoid looking back and wishing you'd tried that little bit harder to make your startup work:

Here's a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?

Many people will have to answer that question by saying, "I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing." Because that's what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y-Combinator, wrote an article entitled "How not to die". He argues that founders should play a high-stakes game in which quitting leads to great embarrassment. He believes that the vast majority of startups would succeed if the founders kept at it:

I wish every startup we funded could appear in a Newsweek article describing them as the next generation of billionaires, because then none of them would be able to give up. The success rate would be 90%. I'm not kidding.

If you're still having doubts, go and read those articles in full. Give it everything you've got, exhaust every idea. You'll either be in the 90% who succeed (because they didn't just give up) or be able to look back and know that you couldn't have done anything more.

New Year, New Blog

james@jamesmaskell.co.uk (James Maskell) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:55:51 +0000

I've lost count of the number of times that I have started a blog but failed to maintain it. I think there are two main reasons for this: a lack of anything meaningful to share on a regular basis and dissatisfaction with blogging platforms. I'll tackle these points in turn.

I have co-founded a startup

The big change in January 2012 is that I'm now co-founder of a startup. I'm based in London and have been working hard for the past few months, setting up the company, learning a lot of code and building out our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We have hired a couple of freelancers, are making good progress and should have something to launch within the next 4-6 weeks - maybe sooner.

This isn't the first business that I have run (I founded and later sold Prime Hosting when I was in school) but it is the first that I've been working on full time. At the time of writing, the London startup scene is starting to take off in a big way and I believe that sharing my experiences will be useful to others taking the same path. I have certainly benefited from the advice and experiences that other entrepreneurs have blogged about.

Blogging Platforms

In the past I have dabled with a variety of blogging platforms. I have used WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and most recently Posterous, but have never felt particularly satisfied with any of them (I might give my reasons in a future post). A few months ago I became aware of Jekyll. Jekyll is a static blogging engine that satisfies my need for something lightweight, that I can self host, and that doesn't need ongoing maintenance. It takes a little bit of effort to set up and learn (I still have tweaks to make) but it should make blogging more enjoyable for me.