Ask YC: I could use your comments on my project and plans to monetize it
I worked on it for two years but then ran into funding problems. I was able to do a big rewrite in 2003 and I have been doing small imrprovements since. About a year ago I started working on it more actively again. I am a single founder..
Stats: OfficeZilla accounts 12,018 OfficeZilla total users 27,740 Signups in the last 30 days 497 (which is average)
After thinking about different plans to make this into a revenue generating system I decided that people will not pay for the basic features but they do want customization to fit there needs exactly. I have enough users to take a segment and develop to there needs so I decided upon realty agents.
So I started putting together RealtyGoLive.com (it looks terrible right now forgive me) which would have:
1. The collaboration system customized to an realty agents office
2. A website system with websites for each agent, and an office website (the aggregated listing). I already have the start on this, totally integrated and managed from the collaboration system. So management is all done in one place.
3. A PBX system where agents would have a mailbox for each house, could leave details and recieve messages to email, faxing out and so on. Lots of good stuff, I like the pbx idea.
4. And other features too many to list but I think I could get them done in around 3 months or so if I was working on them full time
I am currently hosting the system on an older server with 2 gigabytes of ram and 2 x 800mhz processors. I have a dedicated sql server, again it is an older server dual 1ghz processors and 2 gigabytes of ram. I also have two 1 terabyte nas systems for file storage and backup. People get really mad when I loose there files which has happened thus I got the two nas systems which cost me more money then I could afford.
I sometimes feel a bit behind the times, I am not really into lots of javascript and I am not doing any ajax type things at all. On another project I did, I do plan to implement some changes in this regard to make the system look a little better and save the data differently, as they move from field to field for example. The scripting language for the system is now out-of-favor but I have like 100,000 lines of code and I don't feel a great need to go and do a re-write, I can't do it, it would take a long time and everything works fine now. I even have rss feeds for (nearly) every feature.
I applied to YC with the RealtyGoLive idea, but I am not sure if that was the best angle to give YC so I am expecting to not make the hurdle there but I feel like I can compete with the likes of http://www.alamode.com/products/Broker/BrokerXsites/default.... and turn RealtyGoLive.com into a million dollar business (at least) and maybe take it world wide because realty is sold everywhere and the system is already internationalized.
I spent a couple of the years not really working on the system much and that hurt, I am now working on tieing all of the modules together better they already have a group permissions that run accross everything (which is the whole basis of the system) but I also want tie the different data together. For example if you open contacts you could also see any other related information in other modules. There is a lot to do to catch the system up. It is not bad, people who use it, use it a lot.
I know everyone here is real big on languages running on Linux/BSD (which when I first started creating websites in 1996 that all I did was apache/linux/perl) but I discovered the power of databases and ASP was the big thing, PHP was around but didn't seem as good in 1999 when I got ASP heavily and I am still doing things like it is 1999. That is so out of character for this board I thought I would bring it up and see what you think of my system and see think about my unusual development system in todays environment.