I am very thrilled to launch the new and improved Skimbit blog!

Up until now, Birth of a Startup was about my experiences creating Skimbit over the last year and a half. But things are different now… our operations have moved from Sydney to London, I have funding from the bank, I have a fantastic customer for my Skim-in-a-box product, and there is starting to be a bit of buzz about what Skimbit is all about. So it made sense to revamp the blog into something vaguely appealing.

Let me know what you think of the new design… created by the brilliant team of Jason and Stéphane of Research & Development.

Its a happy day today… to be discussed on someone else’s blog is one thing… but to be discussed on TechCrunch is pretty exciting stuff! And even more special is that I am three blog posts away from my good friend Nigel’s company Zygo Communications. Not a bad day for Skimbit.

So, now I just need this post to inspire other influential bloggers, and this buzz to drive customers to the site and potential clients knocking on my door… So if anyone is reading this and owns a blog… be a mate and start the buzz!

read more | digg story

I was lucky to be involved in Mashup Demo yesterday. Despite its catastrophic lack of internet access (the irony of running an internet application demo event where there was only one computer in the entire room capable of connecting to the internet was not lost on anyone!), it was actually a fun and rewarding event.

There were several challenges of course. The first – and I hate to admit this – is that I had a slight hangover from a Christmas party the night before. Normally I am really confident with presenting, but with my head hurting and having such trouble stringing two words together in the morning, I panicked. I went into practising frenzy mode… convinced that if I tried hard, I could force my brain into submission. It was made even more difficult by the second challenge: the evil 5 minute limit!

(more…)

Running a business is hard enough to do, and doing it on your own is unfathomably difficult. I had always intended to hire a couple of people as soon as I got funding, but although my last entry posted 6 weeks ago said I got funding, that funding is still being processed, which completely stifled my ability to act upon my plans.

After 5 weeks though, I realised that I just needed to move forward with or without the funding. I was achingly aware of how incapable I was of doing it all on my own. So after consulting with various people, I decided to put an ad on the Gumtree. I couldn’t afford a proper recruitment consultant, or expensive advertisements. Gumtree is a fantastic place to get employees – its very cheap to post an advert, you get massive numbers of people responding, and the calibre of people is excellent.

(more…)