• The wise writing from Dave Pollard about Un-learning to play. I find his let-self-change  concept both powerful and poetic. Change is a posibility most of the time.
• Dave also writes about building natural enterprise. How to make a living doing what is relevant.
• The road itself is inspiration: social media, online conversations, blogs, … whatever, just watch your steps.
• People like Crossfit-Hq demostrate the many niches available for meaningful, community-based business.
• Small changes, a word at a time, that invite to change and reflection, ecopreneur, entregreeneur, communities of practice, openspaces.

And from the experiences of people playing with money and free/open software:

• Running your company as an Open Source Project
• Software as a public good
• The meatcloud manifesto: men trying to tame infrastructures and meatclouds, and making money in the process.
• And learning from the errors of others, never forget that money changes everything.

I’m in the planning phase of a joint venture in which most of my revenue will consist on a  sales percentage once the shop is up and running; why this kind of agreement aren’t more prevalent? I suppose they are perceived as risky. Better a web we cannot manage than share a fraction of its non-profits.

To the old-timer paying a commissions to salesmen should  be more than familiar; to the developer a percentage serves as motivation to keep things updated and justifies maintenance chores that sometimes are hard to bill.

So maybe some business should be looking for web developers willing to act as they sales representatives on the web and earn a mutual profit.

The web page for Hotel Mayari is simple, the content almost static. Most of the job was mediation, bypassing the limitations frequently found in spanish hosting companies, cooperation, and coercion of past service providers. Some of the troubleshooting included:

• Expiring domain names.
• Unknown hosting capabilities
• Missing database access.

Client had ideas on the looks of the final page, but for every intermediate step they needed constant reassurement. The facilitation done by Visualtis was 10% of technical nature, 30% of hand-holding and coaching, 30% of client and providers negotiation, and 30% of education.

These are some of the things I learned in the first years:

• Give testing priority.It’s hard, and it takes resources but if you don’t commit to proper  testing from the beginning, you never will. The later on you make your commitment the harder it becomes, until it is one of your eternal TODO items.
• Care for your internal communication. Provide spaces and tools for conversation, both real and electronic. People should feel comfortable and the information must be readily accessible and search enabled.
• If you can’t trust your employees, distrust them (deeply).
• Marketing and sales are a priority, you are supposed to run a business for money. The perspective of a sales person helps when searching new venues and income sources.

Last: try hard to make fun. I’m sure our last project benefits from the experience gathered; but the energy people are putting into it and the fun we are getting is something we needed in our past venues. I feel that makes a lot of difference, we really like our Porra!

Some one else sharing experiences at a startup-wannabe?