Work
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
at 7:43pm
BeerChief has only been up and running 2 days, but myself and Adam are already in the process of a major revamp.
BeerChief v2
There are plenty of things we know we can improve… layout, use of AJAX, comments section, lack of ‘groups’ section, lack of profile customization for members, better organization on the admin side of things…
BeerChief ‘v2′ will iron out all of these problems and really begin to put the ‘world class’ feel in BeerChief. We’re never going to happy - i think that’s obvious… but if we can match the big guns and keep it as simple as possible that’ll be good enough.
I haven’t spoken yet about ads yet on BeerChief… it’s too early and we’ll only be adding ads to the site when we’re completely cash strapped. For now and in to the near future, BeerChief will be ad free as we try to build up membership, content and make the site bug free.
If we keep growing though, inevitably we’ll have to put ads on the site simply to pay for the server/s and upkeep. We’ve invested $10k+ so far, expect that to rise to about $12k when v2 is launched. I’ll quite happily live on the breadline for BeerChief…
Early signs suggest it will be worth my while… at it’s current rate of growth we’re looking at 600 members per month. So by Christmas (~6 months time), we should have 4k members based on our stats so far. We are of course still in private mode and haven’t promoted the site so realistically, i’d be expecting 5-10 times that figure…. 20-40 thousand members and if we get to that stage we’re in business.
Easier said than done though…let’s drag up this post at Christmas time and i’ll see how much i got right 
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Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
at 2:12pm
Google Analytics have been installed less than 24 hours on BeerChief, yet they’re already showing 120 unique visitors, and over 1000 page impressions.
That’s a pretty good start considering the site has restricted access! I keep saying it, but we’ve yet to promote it. I’d say we’re at about 5% promotion throttle…. 95% left in the tank which means the site’s gonna explode once it’s opened up to the public, and that’s not even taking in to account the fact we’ve got some massive new features lined up 
Day 2, and we’ve already made over a dozen changes and fixed 2 or 3 bugs. We’re also planning some huge changes - the sort of changes that will really give us a ‘world class’ edge.
If you think BeerChief is a nice site at the minute, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet I’m now extremely confident we can go on to dominate the whole Beer social network niche. If we continue to act on feedback like we’re doing, there won’t be any problems. Keeping the work ethic up is the tough part, but then again i don’t consider it work when i’m not working for anyone or taking orders or don’t have set time 
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
at 8:35pm
Rather than refer to these end of month recaps as ‘month year earnings’, i’ll start to call then ‘month year recaps’ from now on as that’s really the way i’m heading at the minute - focus on content rather than cash. So here’s the ‘June 2008 recap’.
BeerChief. Plain and simple. It’s all been about BeerChief. Today, we’ve just launched BeerChief and it’s the culmination of a lot of money, time and hard work. So far, so good… we’ve got some great detailed feedback and i’ve already made dozens of small changes based on that.
The initial reaction thus far has been positive. Keep in mind most of the current users are friends / online pals etc… so they’re not likely to bash the site like complete strangers would. But these are people we trust to give a fair opinion of the site and that’s what we’ve gotten so far.
Anyway, it’s a bit early to be talking about how BeerChief’s doing as it’s only been up and running ~6 hours.
In June, i also headed to London for a few days. I got word i’d failed my maths exam in College and of course i introduced a new theme to this blog. I also hit the 1000 post mark on this blog and just to cap it all off hit the 250,000 word mark in the same post
On this blog, i said i’d planned to up the quality a bit. I think i’ve done that. I’ve tried to add more pictures to my posts and keep them interesting. I’ve been de-railed slightly by BeerChief but that’s to be expected really.
I also said i’d reward my top commenters at the end of every month from now on with a special mention. So here you are guys (top 5);
Keep up the good commenting
So June was a pretty eventful month, i did make about $85 in some recent sales but as i’ve said above, it’s not about the money really any more - it’s about quality.
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
at 3:55pm
*sigh* it’s been a busy day… I was up extra early this morning like i said i would be… that was after a late night of polishing up some BeerChief pages.
I had to send out ~150 emails (not manually - i’m not that hard a worker), update the BeerChief blog, fix some errors, send a few normal emails and try to respond to feedback whilst trying to update my own BeerChief profile and add videos, photos etc…
I can just imagine the chaos it would cause if i actually *tried* promoting the site
To access the site, go to beerchief.com/beer
- username: beer
- password: okok
In some sort of twisted / evil ‘coincidence’, my college results arrived today in the post as if to say, ‘we come first’. Repeat form etc… included… i have to repeat maths. Loads of time for that though. 6 weeks at least.
BeerChief comes first
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
at 2:49am
Today is July 1st, it’ll go down in history as the day BeerChief launched in private BETA mode. By the way, for anyone wondering what ‘BETA’ mode is - it’s just a fancy term for public testing.
Later today, BeerChief will officially open up to the world. Kind of. It’s not a full public launch, but it’s a private BETA launch and the only difference is that we’ll be holding back our aggressive promotion campaign a little longer.
There’ll be no serious attempt to drive traffic to the site, we’ll keep a low profile and spend our time examining feedback. There will be at least one major upgrade before we go public and i’ve said previously i’m already working on that.
Everything is working at present on BeerChief, the only issue we face is with videos. Hopefully we’ll get it sorted sooner rather than later though. On the issue of videos - we’ve done something pretty clever by installing a modified video section which effectively offloads 100% of video bandwidth to youtube. I’ll talk about it at a later date.
I’ll post full details on how to access the site later, don’t worry, you’ll all be able to gain access to the site without much effort In the meantime, check out our slick new homepage design and blog design. Guess who created both
Anyway, it’s 3am - i’ll be up extra early tomorrow to try and add more content to BeerChief. I also have to prepare an email to send out and create two blog posts - one for the BeerChief blog and one for this blog. It really doesn’t stop… and we’re not even launched yet 
Add in the pressure of keeping advertisers happy, keeping the features coming for members, making sure the site is up 24/7…. it’s a 24/7 job if you’re serious about it. Fast forward a few months and ironically that’s the situation i dream of being in
