nimbletoad blog

According to Fast Company in their article on Ning the secret to creating a billion dollar business is by building a “viral expansion loop” right into the foundation of the product. Sounds simple, the first few paragraphs sing of statements like, “no [need] for advertising or marketing budget….almost guarantees self-replicating borg-like growth…”

I get the concept of viral expansion and you should too, but this post is not about that so go read the article. Hidden within this article is the true secret to building a billion dollar business and your not going to like it.

The secret is persistent hard work, ignoring naysayers, and (while I write this reluctantly) capital and leverage.

While Ning is currently enjoying cosmic growth it took THREE YEARS TO GET THERE, 15 million in start-up capital, and 40 million in additional funding. Profitability is only on the horizon, and was written off time and time again as dead and gone by Silicon Valley insiders. These tidbits were peppered throughout the article. Not to mention the shoulders Ning is built upon. The question that needs to be answered is, “Would Ning be at this stage of growth without the Silicon Valley weight that was thrown at it. The founder Marc Andresson already has several billion dollar companies under his belt namely Netscape and Opsware. Could an unknown with little or no capital pull this off?

The answer thankfully is yes. Why? Because the unknown is out of the limelight, does not have to face naysayers, is able to slog through the years it takes to get there, and most importantly is able to revel in small successes along the way since every little achievement is a new feeling.

We are in the process of fleshing out a web app for wine collectors to store their cellar information online simply, safely, and securely. While there are many other online cellar management solutions out there such as cellartracker, Nimbletoad’s solution promises to be the simplest and most intuitive.

The problem that we see with many online wine database solutions is that they try to box the user into a set of rules and standards. For example, cellartracker makes their user search through the entire database for existing entries before adding a bottle to their collection. While this process ensures standardization, it takes a lot of time.

Standardization is great for community involvement and marketing purposes, but it does little to help serious collectors enter their wines quickly and then retrieve the bottles from their cellar easily.

The blueprint for Nimbletoad’s cellar solution comes directly from the trenches of San Francisco where an offline version was used to track the multi-million dollar cellars of the city’s most serious wine collectors. During the founder’s ten year stint as wine buyer for one of San Francisco’s largest wine stores, the most important aspect of a cellar database was quick, easy entry and lighting fast retrieval.

Nimbletoad’s cellar solution vinecat will be akin to a professional photographer’s camera bag. Little padding and lots of utility.

At Nimbletoad we use Django, built on the Python framework, and Rails, built on Ruby, everyday to speed up web development. While our staff is equally divided between the two framework’s and endless debates ensue as to which is better, no one argues their merit.

Rails and Django, creations of David Heinemeier Hansson and Adrian Holovaty respectively, allow web developers to program and deploy web applications in a fraction of the time.

The key here is that their creations ride on top of existing programming languages. Without them, Web development would still take place. The end results would be the same. However, these two guys saw a way to create frameworks that would further boost functionality.

Functionality is the desired result, While Creativity the guiding force.

Just as David and Adrian stood on Ruby and Python’s shoulders, web development companies such as Nimbletoad stand and build upon the creations of David and Adrian.