January has gotten off to a perfect start. Traffic and RSS subscribers on this blog are way above average. BeerChief has now been launched and is slowly taking shape… looking better by the day.

At college, things seem to be getting easier, not harder and i’m not sure whether that’s a case of me working harder or whether things are just actually getting easier – either way it doesn’t matter as i’m getting results in a results based business.

Driving force behind BeerChief v2

On the eve of my Christmas exams, i wasn’t up until the early hours of the morning studying, i was up until the early hours formulating a bullet proof plan to get BeerChief launched publicly ASAP.

My plan was simple; up my stake in BeerChief to 60% from 50% and in return, shoulder the last stage of development by myself – financially and management-wise. Delivery date i set myself was January 27th. That was back on December 14th.

So i was effectively ‘buying’ 10% extra in BeerChief. There were a few reasons for that…

• First of all, an extra 10% gives me a 60% stake in BeerChief. Even though the site isn’t worth anything much at the minute, i’m confident enough in myself and in the site and idea to say that it was a wise move – it will be worth something in a couple of years time and my guess is that 10% will be worth a hell of a lot more than what i paid for it.
• Secondly, BeerChief was going nowhere. It needed to be grabbed by the by throat and pulled forward. An added 10% incentive was enough for me – that’s what sparked me in to taking on a no-nonsense approach to development.
• Thirdly, BeerChief is safe in my hands… i know in my mind that it will not be sold anytime soon or will not die so long as the majority of it is under my control. At 50-50 i might have been tempted to take a ‘well why should i do x, y and z if the rewards are being split down the middle’ attitude. With 60% – that attitude won’t surface as i stand to lose more if BeerChief fails. I don’t like losing anything
• Fourthly, i knew i had a lot of time off over Christmas and the new year – about 4 or 5 weeks in total. In the end, that time off turned in to non-stop work from morning to night 5 days a week and then any spare time i had at weekends too. I set a deadline for myself for late January and the reason for that was because i knew i’d be back at college at that stage and strapped for time…  i also knew that getting BeerChief up and running by the end of January would be a boost for myself – it would mean 2009 starts with a bang and leaves me with exactly 11 months to get members and traffic.
• Fifthly, i knew that if i waited any longer, i could end up blowing what little cash i had on other things. A non-finished BeerChief isn’t worth anything. A finished BeerChief, even if it’s just let sit, is worth much more. With money scarce these days for everyone, it made sense to get rid of it now and put it towards something useful and something that could potentially turn itself in to a goldmine in the future.

Where too now?

BeerChief is by no means perfect. But what we’ve done now is given ourselves a solid base to work from. There’ll be more features coming over the next few weeks and once they’re all in place, the site should start to promote itself and attract beer lovers. Although we’ve just launched BeerChief v2, there is a 3rd already in development and that shows that (a) we’re thinking positively (b) we’re trying to improve all the time.

Although it may take a while, we’re determined to build BeerChief in to a large global community of alcoholics alcholol lovers. THE largest in fact. It’s an ambitious target, but now is the time to do it – when we’re young, broke and enthusiastic…