GDK Software

It's hot in San Francisco

2008-09-05T20:27:00.000-07:00

We've topped the 90 degree mark for three days running, and I'm beginning to question my decision to move to the sunniest part of town. The fog of the Sunset sounds pretty nice right about now.

Anyway...

Lots of happenings around here. We've launched a new homepage (which I assume you've all already seen if you're reading this) which showcases the top celebrities of the day in real-time, and we're actively bolstering our writing talent pool for the "Noozler Says" portion of the website. I'm sure you'll all be relieved that you'll no longer be subjected to my particular brand of humor-lack.

We also launched our first mini-marketing campaign, and the results are positive to date. We've had our biggest three days of traffic since hitting the big red button, and our SEO continues to pay dividends... to the tune of 3x growth in less than a week. Now, THAT is what I call dividends.

In other news, Keith is well and Gabe finally received his second kiss. Love and miss you all. We'll see you at Thanksgiving!

Amusing Exchange

2008-07-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

A common complaint heard at Noozler headquarters is that Dan and I spend too much time talking about sports.

Gabe entered the room.
Dan entered the room.
Dan: sup
Gabe: yez?
Keith: just wanted to say i am REALLY excited to launch.
Dan: dude, i couldn't agree more
Gabe: aww
Keith: i don't usually get physically excited for stuff. i'm really looking forward to it.
Dan: i was talking to gabe yesteday i think -- we've got a good product, and it keeps getting better
Gabe: I'm not excited.
Gabe: actually kinda boring now.
Gabe: lets build something else /sarcasm.
Keith: let's do something sports related!!!
Dan: hahaha
Keith: like a fantasy sports information site
Gabe left the room.
Keith: LOL
Dan: LOL!!

Collecting Feedback

2008-07-29T14:50:00.001-07:00

Throughout our private launch period, we've received a lot of feedback from our friends. Until now, we'd be aggregating feedback in an informal and I'm slightly ashamed to say sloppy, manner. Sometimes we'd forward an email with an idea to our company distribution list, other times we'd place it in a thread in our wiki, and sometimes we'd try *really* hard to commit an idea spoken verbally to memory.

Enough was enough. We decided to formalize our feedback collection. I took a look at a few free web based tools and ultimately decided on one called User Voice. User Voice provides a (sometimes too) simple interface for people to make suggestions about our site. Suggestions can be commented on, voted on, and officially responded to. User Voice also provides some light categorization functionality.

We're hoping that our devout users will use User Voice to report bugs and suggest features.

Check it out: http://noozler.uservoice.com.

Break Out the Cigars

2008-06-30T23:42:00.000-07:00

We've officially birthed a baby website. As of 11:02PM on Friday, June 27, 2008, noozler.com is live to the world.

The launch itself was rather anti-climatic as we'd all been working like madmen since before 9am that morning and were dead tired as a result. Additionally, all the launch itself technically entailed was removing a login prompt from our webroot. Hardly the type of epic enterprise deployment evenings we'd grown accustomed to at larger organizations... well, aside from the 14 hour day part.

It was a momentous moment nonetheless, as this was the culmination of many months of blood, sweat and beers. We celebrated with a bottle of cheap champagne and a simple toast in my kitchen.

We decided to keep things quiet on the search engine and extended friend networks for the time being to see how things go with a smaller ramp of traffic. All I can say at this point is "so far so good." Gabe has been working hard on adding some grace to the underpinnings, Keith has been knocking out bugs (in between bouts with laptop-itis) and I've been adding copy while Yana graciously volunteered her time to the unenviable task of entering celebrity relationships.

Tonight we all celebrated by visiting Keith's new apartment to plan where he'll hang all of his Debbie Gibson posters and then having a few drinks in the Mission (The Monk's Kettle at 16th and Valencia is now officially endorsed by GDK Software, BTW). It was a quiet, happy evening that capped a quiet, happy launch. We've all been around the software block enough times to know better than to expect all releases to be so smooth, but here's to hoping!

www.noozler.com

Resiliency is a warm gun

2008-06-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

As those close to us already know, it's been a rough few months for everyone at GDK. A trifecta of personal suckitude hit the GDK triumvirate about two months ago. Despite the setbacks (which included two untimely passings and a divorce) we're back with all hooves running, and Noozler is ready to launch!

We're planning a small, unheralded release this coming Friday with intensive usage analysis and bug tracking to follow. The good news here is that, despite all (or perhaps because of) the hard times, the product is far more mature than we'd hoped it to be for initial release, so flames from our friends and family should be on the minimal side of soul crushing.

Hopefully this also ushers in the era of me no longer having to play the role of sysadmin. I'm quite certain Gabe is tired of me taking hours instead of minutes to figure out how apxs does its magic.

Noozler Design Work

2008-04-17T15:01:00.000-07:00

Since neither Gabe, Dan, nor myself have any design chops, coming up with branding and a look and feel for our website felt like a daunting task.

Fortunately, we all agreed that this was not our core competency and so we set out to find a designer. We collected resumes and portfolios from craigslist, but we ultimately decided upon a company called Dworkz. They were referred to us by a friend, but they also had by far the most impressive portfolio, making the decision easy.

Working with Dworkz was helpful beyond the design work they provided. The requirements asked for by the designer (hi, Stas!) forced us to more completely think through our page templates. Seeing the logo and branding ideas he presented us pressured us to make decisions about what exactly we want to project. In order to get the finer details of the design right, we had to have specific use cases worked out.

For the most part, the three of us agreed upon design decisions the needed to be made. We did have some contentious discussions about minutiae that now seem silly, but the process of being involved in the design helped all of us feel more connected with the brand.

It's a bit early to unveil our page templates, but now seems like a good time to publicize our logo:

To Office or not to Office...

2008-03-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

As many people that work out of their home can tell you, spending months on end working long hours in your underwear is a dream at first, but can make the disentangling of "home" from "home/office" tough. Those with significant others will attest with particular clarity that, after awhile, separation of church and state begins to sound pretty darned nice.

As a result, we made the decision late in 2007 to find some humble little space to call "office." The reasons were obvious. We would all gain productivity and morale boosts by working in the same location and we could get out of the house without annoying every coffee shop owner in the Mission by spending entire days there for the price of a few measly lattes (or, in the case of Atlas Cafe, ginger lemonade...mmmm).

As luck would have it, a friend of mine from the very early days of StubHub recently founded an up-and-coming startup (Stitcher.com) and he had some extra space in their office near downtown. He offered a more than fair price, a month-to-month handshake agreement and the location was prime -- literally on Pier 9 -- so we decided to take the leap.

We moved in at the midpoint of January, 2008, and it proved to be one of the best decisions we could have made. This was particularly true for Keith and I, as we tend to be more chatty than most when we work. Gabe tends to prefer a quieter workplace, but that's what headphones are for, right?

Productivity and velocity instantly improved, and things really started rolling as we quickly signed on a fantastic financial and business building adviser in Bill Lentini of W.E.L. Enterprise, and began building our visual identity with Stanislav Udotov of D.Workz Interactive (more on this in a future post). We continued moving extremely well on the technical side of things and the views from the Pier were incredible! We could literally walk out a sliding glass door on to the pier, looking directly out onto the beautiful San Francisco Bay.

I'll be sure to post pictures of the location shortly for everyone's viewing pleasure.

With summer rapidly approaching and the San Francisco rain making way for sun and blue skies, we're now considering leaving our humble little office in favor of cafes with free wireless and outdoor seating. As a completely bootstrapped organization, keeping overhead low is key for our early success, and with a public launch quickly approaching, our hosting costs are guaranteed to be on the rise.

It will be sad to say goodbye to Noah, Peter and the Stitcher crew, the wonderful views of the Bay Bridge and my morning walks to work. That said, this is an easy way to cut some costs, get nice and tan while we work, and, honestly, our current spot won't comfortably hold the number of bodies we expect to need next winter. So onward and upward and we will definitely owe Stitcher a debt of gratitude for years to come for giving us an early boost at such a formative point in our development.

Thanks, Noah!

Acronyms FTW

2008-03-07T11:33:00.000-08:00

What does the "GDK" in "GDK Software" mean?

Gabe, Dan, Keith, of course.

We let Gabe put his name first because it makes the initials sound like some new fangled software development kit. Plus he lobbied the hardest.

To Name a Website

2007-12-05T13:15:00.000-08:00

At least three quarters of our cycles at GDK have been spent on a website that is currently in stealth mode. Naming this site proved to be quite a challenge.

Almost every interesting domain name as well as any domain name related to an interesting domain name has been taken. Since our website is in the celebrity gossip space, this is doubly true. Any domain name with the strings celebrity, celeb, gossip, or hollywood is taken. Domain squatting goes largely un-prosecuted and as such scooping up myriad domain names and selling them to desperate small business owners is a big business.

To drive home this point, let's examine the domain names of some of the major players in this space:
1) PerezHilton.com (The owner likely decided upon the Paris Hilton inspired pseudonym after hours of searching for a domain)
2) Celebitchy.com (Hey, at least it rhymes with something they actually wanted)
3) TheSuperficial.com (I actually like this one, the name vaguely articulates what the site is about)
4) wwtdd.com (Obscure Fight Club reference. At least the domain is short)
5) DListed.com (I have no idea what this is supposed to refer to) (ed note: This is a reference to a Kathy Griffin joke about not being on the A or B list of celebrities... she is on the D list. Keith should know this. Bad, Keith, bad.)

The list goes on. The point I'm trying to drive home here is that it requires some serious creativity to find a domain that a) conveys what the site is about and b) is catchy and clever.

After a few depressing hours spent looking up hundreds of would be company names, we finally decided to get serious and hosted a formal brainstorming session at Dan's house. Armed with a whiteboard and beer (to get the creative juices flowing), we started writing down every word or phrase that we felt our site was about. We then combined them in interesting ways and looked up the resulting expressions on the domain registration database. What did we find? Zip, zero, nada. Everything even remotely interesting was taken.

After sending emails to the owners of a few domains we really liked and being asked for 6 figure sums in return, we grew increasingly desperate. We started experimenting with creative misspellings of some of our favorite phrases. We quickly glommed onto the word "nooz". Nooz.com? Taken, of course, in 1997 no less. How about noozler.com? Bingo.

We like that "nooz" is a playful riff on the word "news", similar to the way that celebrity gossip is related to real news. The "ler" suffix allows us to brand around a concept that we like.

But best of all: noozler.com was available for domain registration.

First!

2007-12-01T19:35:00.000-08:00

We've been talking about setting up a company blog for some time, and now that we actually have a company, an office and a product rapidly approaching private release, the time seems right to put proverbial pen to paper. But where to start?

How about at the beginning?

GDK got its start when Keith and I decided to leave our last place of employment on the same day. It was mid-afternoon, mid-week on a sunny October day, so we decided to grab a beer and enjoy the warm weather while contemplating our newfound unemployment. Having worked together at StubHub.com and FanIQ.com for a number of years, we knew we wanted to keep the tradition alive, but were a little hesitant to join another angel funded startup.

My previous two jobs had both been in the early stages of such companies, and let me be the first to say that inheriting an organically and rapidly produced codebase was not high on my to-do list. Luckily, Keith felt the same way.

I'd been kicking an idea for a website around in my head for some time, and after the second beer, it seemed like the best time to throw it against the wall for stickiness testing. Keith was into it and we decided to give it a go, if only to occupy the time until The Perfect Job Opportunity™ came along.

Meanwhile, another of my longtime compatriots was considering a move from his engineering job at StubHub. Gabe and I had worked together for the better part of a decade, beginning at Sigma6 Interactive Media back in Detroit. We'd remained close friends after moving across the country together, and somehow always wound up working at the same place. He'd also grown tight with Keith in our StubHub years, so when word got out that Keith and I were going to start something of our own, it was almost a fait accompli that Gabe would join us at his first opportunity.

As it turned out, that opportunity came quickly. Gabe decided to leave StubHub and officially completed our three headed monster at the onset of 2008.

Next up... the birth of Noozler and GDK Software Incorporated...