I have a plan, it involves learning, innovation and contains the word Ninja? Confused, read on!

So, this weeks blog post will probably be more confusing than most.  I had a few ideas floating around in my head that have formed into a kind of business idea (maybe even a plan).

Ninja!

First off, I was looking to buy or start a proper business, what I mean by proper is that it is a limited company registered with Companies House. Why you ask?  Well, I thought it would be a good thing to learn about.   I Thought a good place to start was buying something random off eBay that was already set up,  I hadn’t really worked out what to buy but something online, maybe marketing, SEO or something around that area.  I randomly brought the site Keyword Research Ninja for less than a Dominos pizza.  It sells keyword research software written in C#.  For me, the worst case scenario of buying this site is that I have some fun with the software.  However, this does not fulfill my idea of getting a limited company and the site does need some work.

Vibe Marketing Limited

So, also on eBay, they sell dormant companies (again not sure why I just didn’t set up a new one), and I came across someone selling Vibe Marketing Limited, they wanted quite a bit of money for a name,  after some strong negotiation skills, I brought it for less than a Dominos pizza!  I thought, hey I can get back into SEO (I used to love doing that in my spare time) and do it part-time for fun, just to learn the ropes of running a company.

Coffee with an old friend

I had been in contact with an old friend who used to work at Compsoft when I first joined.  He was a member of R&D and went off to finish his degree, start a company and do pretty well in life.  Anyway, we met up for Costa (Starbucks was too far away) and had a chat about life, work, and code.  He had set up a successful HR company that his wife runs, and he now does PoC work for fun to keep him actively coding.  I mentioned to him to him that I really enjoyed my time at O2’s Lab doing innovation and PoC work and that I missed the crazy times of making stuff work in new tech and then chucking it over the wall for a dev team to properly implement it if the business thought it was viable.

The penny drops.

So, I decided that my next plan of action was to take this limited company (in the process of being renamed to Vibe Innovation) and set it up as a consultancy company that creates proof of concepts for people.   I want to start really small with really small goals, this is still a learning process.  This year’s aim (November / December) is to create the website, set up email and show some of the projects I have done in the past.  Next years goal is simple, do 1 paid bit of work and work out how to process it through the books.

Other news

So work on Echo Music Group is actually progressing nicely.  It’s great fun getting back into doing iOS work.  I am currently working on the signup process.

Elasticsearch definitely seems to be the way to go with Burf.co which has been working well as a search engine.  I need to improve the quality of the dataset (which is in progress) and fix the site to work on mobile.  It has had over 16,000 sites manually submitted to it in the last week which is pretty epic.

I have also upped my reading for a second week in a row, I am now currently reading the $100 startup…. can’t imagine why 🙂