Pajama Entrepreneur

Techcrunch posted this article about Hot or Not, a dating site set up in 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young out of their house. They never took outside funding. Over the years, the founders made $20 million. The site was taking in $600,000 per month in revenue (advertising and paid subscriptions). But last month, they decided to stop charging subscriptions because the other dating sites were giving away access. In an instant, their monthly revenues vanished.

Hot or Not’s story is not an unusual one in the online services space. The decision to turn it into a free service is a brave one, but it was necessary. I doubt they could have made this decision so easily if they had more personnel, high fixed costs and outside investors.

This is the story I like to tell often because it is so unbelievable. Back in May 2005, when Muniwireless.com had already established itself as the place to go to for all things muni Wi-Fi, I was wondering, how do I take it to the next stage? Many people were asking me to hold conferences and seminars, and I thought it would be fun to have an annual meetup of wireless enthusiasts.

I happened to be in San Francisco in May 2005, staying in a friend’s apartment in the Castro District. One day, I found myself in a laundromat (Toni Cleaners and Laundry) across Cafe Flore near the corner of Noe and Castro, waiting for the dryer to finish. I was bored, so I picked up a copy of the San Francisco Examiner, a local free paper, which I never usually read. I was flipping through the pages when suddenly a tiny article on the right hand side, caught my eye. It was a press release announcing the launch of Microcast Communications. After reading the description of their business, I knew they were the partners I needed to take Muniwireless to the next stage. Continue reading »

By May 2005, I had managed to build an online portal dedicated to a very specific topic: municipal wireless broadband networks. Without any investment other than my time and web hosting costs, the site became the authority on the subject of citywide Wi-Fi. Cities and counties that were thinking of deploying these networks came to Muniwireless.com as did journalists from The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and other mainstream publications. Continue reading »

When I started charging vendors for advertising on Muniwireless, which by the middle of 2005 had become the online portal for news about municipal wireless broadband projects, I began running into potential advertisers who wanted me to say nice things about them in my blog posts. This is common in the publishing industry, I found out, but I was aghast at how aggressive some of them were. But I found a way to deal with them. Continue reading »

By May 2004, I was writing twice as many articles as in January 2004 and better yet, people were sending news reports directly to me. Muniwireless.com was generating a lot of interest not just among city and county officials, but also among equipment vendors.

By the time I released my first anniversary report, I realized there was a way to make money from Muniwireless: advertising. I know that it seems so obvious to anyone who has been in the publishing industry. But to me, it was a surprise. Continue reading »

During the first year of its existence, Muniwireless.com made no money. Because there were few cities setting up Wi-Fi hotzones and hardly any were deploying municipal Wi-Fi networks, posting was light. I would write three to four articles a week, but as the year went by, the number started to rise because more cities were slowly doing something with Wi-Fi.

By January 2004, six months into blogging, traffic to my site began to increase significantly. Vendors of wireless mesh nodes as well as city officials began to email me about their planned projects. There was definitely more activity by March 2004 than when I had started (June 2004). But still no income. Continue reading »

I started Muniwireless.com in June 2003 as a blog. The purpose was to aggregate information about city Wi-Fi projects (mostly hotzones) around the world. Four years later, Muniwireless has turned into a vertically integrated media company with a quarterly magazine, web seminars, conferences in the US, Europe and Asia. How did this happen? Continue reading »