Thethingsiwant.com was critically underfunded, there was an original investment done for version 1 but the truth is version 3 was done by me working on a maintenance fee of 600 USD a month. I believed there was an opportunity there and since I was a partner at the company (not the main one but I still had a considerable chunk) I decided to let loose and chase that opportunity. The truth is my strategy and ideas worked and within 4 years we grew the user base by a twentyfold and the company income by more than a hundredth (by 2008 we were actually turning a profit and I had a decent salary, at least by the Argentinean standards of the time), we also received some critical acclaim being mentioned by the likes of PC Magazine, CNN and the New York Times (and a bunch of other papers, mags and blogs around the world) even though we never put any money into PR for version 3. Anyhow the fact that I was the only person doing everything there (from coding to answering user’s mails and managing google ads, etc. I did everything at TTIW) was beginning to take a toll. The fact that I was also doing college was not helping either. And truth be told we had gotten to the point where we desperately needed a capital infusion (however small, I mean I estimated that just to fund the next version and scaling we needed the equivalent of around two years of yearly income) to scale the main server and add a couple of extra ones to distribute load and also to hire somebody else to help me rewrite some of the code base (it had gotten too big for just one programmer and there were chunks of it that due to being the work of a single overworked person were sort of messy).

There was another problem, my father passed away in January 2000, and he was survived by my 80 year old grandmother and my aunt. Being an only child I became the sole provider for the family in a period that is widely considered to have been the worst economic period of the history of the country (and this is Argentina). My grandmother passed away in 2001 and my aunt who had a degenerative disease that slowly rendered her handicapped (the last 3 years of her life she was completely paralysed from the waist down) passed away in November 2008. You could tell I had every reason to be exhausted by now.

So that brings me to the end of TTIW. Due to the continued growth of the site and the company since I built version 3 we were by now generating some interest and my partner Guy was in talks with some people to maybe sell a chunk of the company to fund operations (nothing like those silicon valley deals you read in techcrunch all the time, that’s science fiction, I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina) but they were dragging along and were not very convinced and other than some fresh money I didn’t saw what value they could have added to the company (they were old media marketing people). And then in the first months of 2009, we were hit by the worst of bad luck. The network card on the server broke down. As simple as that. We had no direct access to the server (which to lower costs in 2005 I’ve moved to the cheapest housing provider I could find) and the housing provider’s support people were not very responsive. And they charged by the hour. American fees.

Anyhow, we had to copy the whole of the database and the images to an external drive and then copy it back to a new server, between the delays of the support people and the actual time of doing this, the site was down for about a week and a half, and I had to use a couple of extra days just to test everything was working. This was a critical hit and we lost a huge chunk of our regular users.

Well, I hadn’t taken a holiday in five years. I had a complete nervous break down. I was so burned out I ended up medicated.

When I got myself together I started talks with Guy to end my participation in the project. I had the intention of using the profit we had made during 2007/8 to maybe get and extra server and hire some help. But a third of it was gone due to the costs of support by the housing people. There is a moment you have to realise that no matter how hard you try and how driven you are, the odds are still stacked against you. And quit.

Anyhow, there is a silver lining to all this. For building version 1 of TTIW, I was paid an american salary, conscious of the economic situation my country was going through and the responsibilities I had assumed with my father, I saved the money. After the argentinian economy collapsed, I took it to heart to develop a rough but practical understanding of macroeconomic issues. While I was reading every book I could find to try to understand what had happened here (it was that traumatic) I realised that the policies the idiotic bush administration was pushing forward would end up taking a hit on the dollar, and made my decisions accordingly. After my aunt passed away I could dispose of that money and my father’s inheritance (which had so far been used to provide for her). I thought about using that money to help keep TTIW going but in all true reality, no matter how much I made the project my own, I had a small participation in the company, it was really Guy’s project. So I’m using my sudden economic tranquillity to finnish college and be a little more relaxed, which I really need, by the way.

Thethingsiwant.com is still live, and Guy is kindly providing some space for hosting my personal site, but I’m not associated with the company anymore. The site has also gotten real slow, that’s because the DB indexes had gotten so big they can’t be stored in memory (the server only has 4 Gbs) so the database is hitting disk on most querys just to check indexes. There is also the regular fine tuning that you have to do to keep a project running that is not being done anymore. I would like to thank everybody that used the site and hope this explains why I’m not working at it anymore I would also like to thank everybody that provided feedback and support (Some times in life just some words of encouragement mean a lot).

There is a lot more to the story of the Thethingsiwant.com than this and I’ve been toying in my head with the idea of writing a series of posts on it (which I would title “Funding is for sissies, the story of thethingsiwant.com”) and tell all the stories I have about the project, like the year I spent in Europe in 2003 (I was considering emigrating) living on 600 dollars a month and coding from cybercafes, of my great friends of the self-styled “argentinian ghetto” (mostly economic emigrants of the argentinian crisis) I used to hang out with in Barcelona and the beautiful women of eastern europe, of the time I spent in Miami in 2001, of the Argentinian crisis and riots on the streets, of dealing with patent trolls and of course of all the hustles of trying to kickstart a project (Version 3) with absolutely no money (like how we got our first batch of faithful users when Paris Hilton did her porn video by creating a fake Paris Hilton list that was reposted in a bunch of blogs, for example: fleshbot.com), etc. The last 10 years have been a hell of a ride, that’s for sure. I might get around to do it or I might not. Because then I read the new microdata spec and I suddenly have the urge to start coding again(!!). And that’s a good thing.