Software

The movie “The Social Network” was a smash hit and gave the general public a good understanding of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook. If you haven’t seen the movie, take a look at the Facebook Wiki and educate yourself on it’s history. The story told in the movie is one we have been questioning lately as our research indicates that Facebook may have borrowed some ideas from an employee management system known as About Face, who owned the domain facebook.com at the time.

What we are proposing about Facebook and it’s history is just speculation from internet archive digging we have done, don’t take this too seriously.

Facebook didn’t start as the Facebook we know now, they went through some name changes as the versions of Facebook advanced. It was initially called Facemash in 2003 and this is when Zuckerberg first developed the app. At this stage of Facebooks life, it was comparible to the once famed website “Hot Or Not” which allowed you to rate girls and guys with a “hot” or “not” rating.

Let us fast forward our story to 2005 when thefacebook.com acquired Facebook.com for $200,000 USD. The company was known as About Face, a website for companies to have an online yearbook of sorts to help track pictures and details about co-workers. This was the logical choice for Facebook, shortening the domain made sense. However, is it possible they had been eyeing this website for a lot longer?

Our research shows that About Face may have been the inspiration for the shift in Facebook’s early development.

“AboutFace Corporation wants to help your organization become more efficient and effective.  Our software solutions make it easy for you to manage and publish your most important information.  This increases communication so that people have the information they need to do their jobs more easily and effectively with a minimum of frustration and re-inventing of the wheel.” – About Face 2001 Mission Statement

About Face was created in 2001 and they were the primary owners of the Facebook.com domain. According to the facebook.com WHOIS record, About Face may have bought the domain as early as 1997 (WHOIS record) .

On a first hand look, About Face was a simple website that gave users the ability to create a profile, write a bio about themselves and upload a picture. It was primarily used for law offices, universities or large corporations. The software hosted on private servers and the various “About Face” networks did not interact with each other as they could only be hosted on a closed intranet.

About Face Features:

• Network with coworkers on a closed network
• Profile with picture
• Profile includes details about career, expertise, schooling and phone number
• Privacy settings to enable or disable access to certain users
• Privacy settings to only allow certain computers into the network (IP filtering)
• Advanced database searching to find results quickly

As early as 2001 About Face had a fully functional profile that displayed details about employees or users in database. This would be run on a local intranet, so it didn’t have the same networking value that Facebook would develop. However, Facebook did start as a service for just Harvard students on their internal network which would have been a suitable environment for About Face to run. Is it possible that Facebook found inspiration in what About Face was developing?

About face had a simple, but effective method for editing profiles. Done by an admin team, users would be entered into the directory and details such as University, Phone Number and job would included on their profile.

Easy to Administer
Even though About Face is very powerful and flexible, it is extremely easy to use. Shown here is the data entry screen, used to enter new people into your directory and to modify existing entries.   Just punch in the information and click the Save button.  The system will automatically generate a username and password for the person, and then it will automatically generate an email to that person informing him or her of this information and explaining how to get into the directory.  It doesn’t get any easier! – About Face Product Demo

About Face was ahead of it’s time with their ability to network coworkers together to efficiently. This would add huge benefits to the workflow of the office as you’d be able to search people by name, phone number or even their area of expertise. This is very similar to the direction Facebook wanted to take at Harvard.

About Face was progressive with their security settings and privacy as well. As shown in their product demo, only IP addresses within a certain range would have access to About Face as specified by the admin team. About Face also allowed users to set their own permission settings and could hide certain details of their profile easily.

Conclusion

It’s impossible to know if Facebook was inspired by About Face, or if it’s a simple coincidence that the domain they wanted to buy was hosting a similar service. About Face was a fully functional profile network with a simple user interface long before Facebook had developed what we know call a social network. What we do know is the similarities are extremely obvious and About Face had a functional product that could have been adapted outside of an internal network if they desired or had the means to do so.

GoDaddy is the most well known web hosting service for small businesses and people entering the world of e-commerce. That is where Godaddys claims end unfortunately because many who sign up for GoDaddy, regret that choice shortly down the road of entrepreneurship. Starting a business means you’re trying to keep initial costs as low as humanly possible, so finding an affordable web hosting service is very important. This article is going to show you the true cost of GoDaddy and provide higher quality less expensive options. Free domains are not exclusive to GoDaddy, don’t get fooled.

So, why is GoDaddy so popular and how does it entice people into starting their first websites? This article will help to explain why all entrepreneurs should avoid GoDaddy in 2019 and moving forward. By the end of reading this, you should feel extremely hesitant about giving your hard earned dollars to a company like GoDaddy. Don’t let GoDaddy wipe you out within 24 months.

GoDaddy’s prices

The most notable aspect of GoDaddy is their enticing marketing offers, which usually states you get a free domain with any hosting plan. Wow, free domains?! This is an offer that most won’t be able to refuse due to the wording. However, you will soon find the costs adding up if you accept this discounted domain. The offer is legitimate of course, they will give you an introductory discount but when the math is done over a one year period, you end up paying more.

As you can see in the above example when purchasing a domain you would pay the following: $3 in year one + $25 in year two for a total of $28 to register a domain for two years. At first this may appear to be priced fairly in comparison to other domains until you want to add anything of value to your domain. Let us proceed further through the GoDaddy checkout.

Here is where things start to get pricey when using GoDaddy. Privacy protection is important when purchasing a domain because without it, the info you provided during the domain registration is public. This may not be a concern for some people, but privacy is paramount for most.

Now let us assume you want your identity protected, this adds another $20 to your 2 year package bringing our GoDaddy cart to $48 CAD

There are companies that offer this for free when you purchase a domain, so this is $20 you don’t need to spend. We will list those companies later on in the article. However, we aren’t finished with GoDaddy yet so let us proceed further into the checkout.

The next step in our cart is adding a domain branded email to the account. So for example: sample@geek0.com would be considered a domain branded email because it uses the @geek0.com domain.

Is GoDaddy email Good?

Again, this is free with other web hosting providers that are mentioned later in this article, but GoDaddy charges a minimum of $6.50 per month. So no, we would say they are not good. Their minimum plan only includes 5GB of email storage which would mean you would constantly be having to delete emails in order to accept incoming ones. To keep things as cheap as possible for this blog post, we will choose the $6.49 / mo plan which costs us a grand total of $155.76 for our two year plan.

That brings the projects total to $203.76 CAD

(don’t forget we haven’t purchased a server to host this domain yet)

Picking hosting is where GoDaddy really starts to sink their hooks into your business. Any entrepreneur will vouch that any of these plans will not suffice for anything larger than your Grandmas blog about where to find cute cat sweaters in North Dakota. If you’re expecting to see any amount of traffic or plan to build an e-commerce store you will soon regret going the GoDaddy route.

(Note, they do include email for free in these plans but they do not specify if it’s a domain branded email or a @godaddy.com email)

Assuming you’re someone who is planning on earning a profit from their web project, you will need an SSL Certificate for your domain. If you’re unfamiliar on why this is important, check out this article. It is impossible to take credit card payments if your website is not SSL secured, so we are forced to purchase the Ultimate package at $16.00 / mo.

GoDaddy Total:$ 587.76 CAD 

$587 is a lot of money for someone to spend on their new venture, especially if the idea is experimental. This cost could be enough to sink an idea someone has before it even blossoms into a business. GoDaddy uses their discounted domains to draw clients in and rake them over the coals as they start adding necessary service to their cart. It’s very clever marketing, but you’re much smarter than that after reading this article.

The GoDaddy Alternative

Hopefully if you’re at this part of the article, you are no longer considering GoDaddy as a viable option for your web hosting. This is where we would like to introduce a hosting company called Dreamhost. Dreamhost is an excellent company with extremely affordable solutions for web hosting. They offer free email, free SSL and robust servers even at their bottom tier. The best part is, the cost is substantially lower than GoDaddy’s plan we priced above. Let us make our way through the Dreamhost checkout and compare prices.

For Dreamhost, we will stick to the same rules as GoDaddy; find the lowest cost hosting plan that can host an e-commerce store.

As you can see in the above, we have picked a shared starter server which will perform quite well in comparison to GoDaddy’s servers. They allow you use to caching plugins and other tools to speed your website up which GoDaddy does not allow. They include SSL for free, a domain branded e-mail and a free domain when you signup.

This brings our cart and grand total to $94.80 USD ($126 CAD) for two years

Yes, you heard that right. On a higher quality server, with all the same features that GoDaddy offered. So how much do you save by choosing a provider like Dreamhost over GoDaddy?

$461.76 saved over two years

With such large savings by choosing a web hosting provider such as Dreamhost, it makes little sense why anyone would choose GoDaddy. It all comes down to marketing and tricking new entrepreneurs into overpaying with clever wording.

The customer service with Dreamhost is also phenomenal as they are a small team of web developers who actually understand technical questions. If you have ever had to deal with GoDaddy customer service, you know their workflow and corporate agenda takes priority over solving any of your issues. If you have ever tried to email GoDaddy customer service, you will also know the pain it causes; it is near pointless trying to troubleshoot with GoDaddys team via email.

Conclusion

GoDaddy is more expensive than we had originally anticipated when planning this article. We knew that GoDaddy was more expensive, but we had no idea it was almost 4x the price of Dreamhost . This goes to show that marketing is a supremely dominant factor in the web hosting game since Dreamhost offers exactly what they do and more.

We hope that whatever web hosting path you decide to take, you don’t choose GoDaddy. Save your money and support a smaller company like Dreamhost, you won’t regret it.

You’ve taken the leap of faith and have decided to start your own business; congratulations ! This article will help to outline five of the best tools to use when you’re getting started with your small business. However, when you enter the market you’re overwhelmed with information being thrown at you from every direction; what makes this article different? How do you decide where to start and what tools you need to get started? These are questions with answers that will vary from person to person but there is a few essential tools that almost every entrepreneur will use in their life time.

This article will keep it dead simple and won’t attempt to cram any paid solutions down your throat. When you’re embracing the hustle and starting your own venture try and keep it simple. You will have time to grow into advanced software solutions and other scaling options, but it’s best to start on a path of low friction so you can get the ball rolling.

This article also assumes you’ve chosen a hosting provider and are ready to get your website launched (If you’re not interested in E-Commerce, this probably isn’t the article for you)

1. WordPress

WordPress is the most versatile and low cost platform to build your website on. It has all the functionality and ease of use when compared to other platforms such as Square Space or Wix, however the plugin store is massive in comparison. You can download thousands of plugins to your site easily without cost.

Another huge benefit to using WordPress is the ability to integrate WooCommerce as your E-Commerce platform. WooCommerce is free unlike Shopify or other store platforms so you can start your website without any fees or initial costs. WooCommerce also integrates with most popular plugins and payment processors such as Stripe and PayPal. If you’re a Cryptocurrency fiend like us at Geek0, you can also install custom plugins that will allow you to accept Bitcoin and other coins as payment. As we said before, it’s all about low friction when you’re starting out and you can have a full website ready to take sales done within hours if you decide to choose WordPress (Did we mention it’s free too?)

2. Google Suite

Did you think we weren’t going to include the amazing suite of tools that Google offers? If you didn’t think we were going to, you probably don’t realize the value it offers.

In our mastermind group, we often joke about all of our businesses being started inside of a Google Spreadsheet. The reality is that most of our businesses did start inside of Google Sheets and some are still functioning as that. Google Sheets offers all the great features as a program like Microsoft Excel, but is stored in the Google cloud. You can integrate a vast number of plugins as well for most advanced usage if you desire so. Don’t waste money on expensive products when Google offers everything you need for free.

Aside from their suite of office tools, we have to mention Google Analytics as well. Google Analytics allows you to track your customer traffic and how they behave on your website. With this information you can optimize your website with the data GA reports to you. Getting to your customers and how they interact is essential to a successful e-commerce business.

3. YouTube

This one might be something you haven’t thought of, but YouTube is a brilliant platform for creating a strong customer funnel. This isn’t a requirement and might be a step outside your comfort zone, but creating evergreen content for your niche is a free way to get in front of your target audience for not cost. Depending on your product or service, this path is going to vary widely but no matter what you decide, make the content engaging for the community. If you’re going to live stream, answers questions. If you’re posting videos, make sure it generates a conversation in the comments. YouTube can take some time to marinate before they start showing your content in the search results, so plan ahead with this content as it will be a slow burn.

4. Twitter

If you’re not already on Twitter, we will assume that you’ve been turned off by how it appears on the surface. On the surface is might appear to be random thoughts posted on a wall with no cohesive focus on what you should write, however this couldn’t be more opposite. As you grow your followers/following you’ll start to find yourself involved in a community and the Tweets become one giant dialogue surrounding your niche and the various topics. Information about major events or any business decision is usually announced first via Tweet.

Twitter is also one of the few places left that you can actually reach the person you want to speak to. The barrier between you and a top level CEO is minimal when you’re on Twitter. Some people have their accounts managed by a social media team, but for the most part everyone is accessible. In a way, Twitter is the modern version of an E-Mail inbox which used to be the only way to reach someone without going through a gatekeeper.

5. Reddit

A strong community a solid foundation for success because if you have a loyal audience and do right by them, the pay off is massive. Reddit is host to every niche community you can possibly think of. We encourage all our readers to sign up on Reddit and get to the sub-Reddit most applicable to their niche or business. You will get a raw sample set of potential customers and people who know your product or business inside out. For example, if you were going to start selling Skateboard Wheels online, you would want to find a sub-Reddit of skateboarders who can speak to everything surrounding the culture. The value in this is perhaps something like plastic wheels versus rubber wheels is a make or break for some potential customers and knowing that preference could be huge for your new Skateboard store. This is a silly example of course, but you should get the idea of why Reddit is valuable.

Honorable Mention: PayPal

Everyone hates PayPal in the world of small business and so do we. However, we can’t forget where we made out first sale and that was inside PayPal which most entrepreneurs in 2019 would probably say is the home of their first sale too. PayPal integrates with every platform around the world and only requires a bank account to sign up with. They’re not technically free since they will rake you over the coals with fees, but PayPal is still the most simple option to getting paid.