The future’s bright, the future’s BeerChief

This time last year, BeerChief was conceived and in it’s early days, i was still thinking what i could do with it. I broke the news on Feb 2nd 2007 that i’d bought the name BeerChief.com

At that stage, i was still a teenager (hmm… i wonder if that would qualify me as a teenage dot com millionaire if i become a millionaire later on from that idea ).

Fast forward a year and BeerChief is still in development. It’s been a lot of work, even though it may seem like we’ve done nothing on it. I’ve got literally dozens of printed documents regarding BeerChief and loads of ideas and plans… some we’ve ditched, others we’ve sticked with… the spine of the idea is still there though and that’s pretty impressive.

Despite lack of finances, a year in the wilderness, ups and downs, both of us still remain confident in BeerChief and are still very much determined to deliver that ‘world class’ social networking site i talked about in the past.

At the minute, i’ve just put together a full list of specs and VERY shortly (as in the next week), we’ll be listing a build project on some of the big freelance sites, with a fairly large budget

When all is said and done, between the two of us, we’ll probably have over $4k tied up in BeerChief, which is a hell of a lot for two young guns who could use that cash for living and drinking and doing what young people normally do with their cash

There’s zero risk in this, certainly that’s the view we take, that’s the confidence we have in it. But the danger is always there that in order to simply keep the site up, we’ll be out of our depth financially… in which case it’s either seek investment & dilute our share, look for grants, take out loans and cross fingers we can repay them.

None of those options are particularly attractive as it de-rails us from the job in hand and immediately turns it in to a profit organization – which puts pressure on us to plaster ads all over the place.

So with that in mind, we’ll deliberately stunt growth in the short term by keeping it invite-only. It will help us fine tune the site and listen to user needs/wants, whilst keeping it all under control to some degree. We’ll then be in a better position to negotiate with advertisers/banks/investors etc..

Even the almighty Bebo ran in to this problem… well not Bebo itself, but Birch’s (the owners) previous attempt at a ‘bebo’. It grew too fast, too quickly and forced him in to selling up. He used the cash to kick start bebo and the rest is history