More than a weekend project

I composed this post back in July, 2008, but never clicked Publish.

Since mid-Feb, my good friend Tom and I have been working on a web project: ScoobyDeal.com, is a deal-at-a-time social commerce site for cool gadgets and great deals. We're down to the last week of testing and bugfixing. I think of this project as my Guy Kawasaki how-I-built-a-web-site for under $X.

This is a v1 of ScoobyDeal with plans to add other social features. This post lays it all out for posterity.

We started the project Mid-Feb and have been working with an awesome team distributed globally on the implementation while doing the product/project management and testing State-side. So here is the breakdown.

One-time Costs:

• Corporate entity: $115, DIY at the Secretary of State's office in San Francisco.
• UI Design (mockups and flows): in- house with endless hours with Adobe Illustrator and lots of help from good friends.
• UI Development: $935 Web Cake, Cairo, Egypt. Initial concepts State-side $350.
• Web Development: $24,500 Idea2It, Chennai, India.
• Logo: $125 Ukraine.
• Copy: in-house (the typos are my fault).

Infrastructure:

• PayPal Web Payments Pro for credit card processing.
• Google Maps API.
• Google Custom Search Engine.
• Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Aparche and Mongrel plus MySQL
• ImageMagick.

Ongoing Costs:

• Web Hosting: Virtual Private Server $49.99/mo. Server Point.
• Collaboration: $12/mo. Basecamp Personal Edition.
• Credit Card Processing: $30/mo. PayPal.
• Version Control and Bug Tracking: $49/year ProjectLocker Light Angel Edition.

Special Thanks:

• Kamo Asateryan for help with social marketing.
• Brodey Jenkins for creativitiy.
• Suren Markossian for help with instrastrucutre.
• Sanjay Kapoor for help with Ruby and Rails.
• Alex Chee for the initial design.
• Team Viewer for being such an awesome product.