As a marketplace business, my startup, Unanchor.com faces a chicken-and-egg problem. We need itinerary writers to attract travelers and travelers to attract itinerary writers. To address the itinerary side of the problem, two months ago Mohammad and I unveiled our most aggressive program to date. We offered to pay writers up to $100 upfront in a revenue advance. In this post, I’ll give an update on the program and its results so far.

A Stroll Down Memory Lane…

When I started Unanchor, I thought finding writers was going to be easy. With all of the travel bloggers and long-term travelers out there, I thought tapping into that market and populating the site was going to be easy…wrong.

Attempt #1 – Guest Posts & Interviews

I started by writing guest posts, doing interviews and trying to plug Unanchor on various blogs. I received positive feedback about the site and drove in some traffic, but ultimately my primary mission of finding itinerary writers failed. This effort disappointingly resulted in only 1 or 2 itineraries.

Attempt #2 – Emailing Bloggers Directly

My next plan was to Email bloggers individually and pitch them on the idea. Every day, my goal was to find at least 3 bloggers and send them an Email. This ultimately resulted in a few interested writers and also a couple of itineraries. I could tell this plan was eventually going to work, but it was very slow and extremely time consuming – in other words, another fail.

Attempt #3 – Up to $100 in a Revenue Advance

Mohammad and I decided to address the problem with money. He invested $5,000 into the business — $2,500 went to legal fees and the other $2,500 was going to be dedicated to itineraries.

When we prepared the program, we decided that the money was going to be an advance on future revenues. The purpose of this was two-fold: 1.) We would be able to make the money back 2.) It (hopefully) signals to the writer that we really believe in the business of selling their itinerary.

Our Goal for the Program

The night before the blog post announcing the program was set to go live, Mohammad and I discussed our goals. We decided to strive for 10 applications in the first week. Given our lack of success previously in recruiting writers, it seemed aggressive at the time, but possible.

So…how has the program done?

In a few words – beyond my wildest expectations.

I launched the program by doing my own personal outreach. I posted on this blog, Freelance-Zone, asked for the help of my fellow Nomad Couriers, and reached out to my entrepreneurial network. Essentially any connections that I thought could be helpful, I asked for help. The first day, we got a nice bump of traffic and a couple applications – the program was off to a good start.

One piece of great advice I received recently was to take my itinerary writing recruiting “up a level”. Meaning – find out where potential itinerary writers hang out and recruit from there –look for associations, forums, and groups. The next day we tried out this advice and posted to the Travel section of Reddit. I was nervous about the reaction of posting something so commercial. The post ended up doing extremely well, getting 44 upvotes, many positive comments, and remained #1 or #2 for its entire 24-hour period. It was the catalyst that kicked the program into high gear.

Within a few hours, the applications began to roll in. In the first two days we received 36 applications to be itinerary writers – blowing away our goal. It was an exciting two days.

Since then, I’ve continued to “take it up a level” and as of this post, we’ve now received almost 300 applications!

Reflecting Back on the Program

Every time I had the opportunity to talk with someone about Unanchor, I brought up our chicken-and-egg problem and asked how would they solve it. I cold Emailed people, went on This Week in Startups (37:00 minute mark), went to the Launch Conference, and posted on this blog. Essentially, I asked advice from anyone who listened. Nearly all of the key ideas to the program ended up coming from these conversations. The idea to solve the problem by paying people, to make it a revenue advance and the idea to “take it up a level” were all the ideas of others.

If this idea would have failed, to be honest, I’m not sure what we would have done. To say the least, I’m really excited that we seem to be over this hurdle.

The Next Hurdle

Like most things, the success of the program has brought on other issues. One issue is the volume of Email I now receive on a daily basis. While it’s exciting to receive so many applications, it has been extremely time-consuming working with all of the new writers – however, this is a good problem to have.

The next issue is the percentage of writers who follow-through on their application. We’ve received nearly 300 applications and accepted about 100 of them, but only 7 itineraries have actually made it to the site.

We’ve started implementing a few things to try and improve this conversion, but the jury is still out if it will make a difference. So, I’m going back to the same process as before and asking anyone who will listen –

What would you do to try and improve the percentage of writers who follow-through on their applications? Leave a comment below or send me an Email, I’d love to hear your advice.

I’ll make sure to have a follow-up post and let you know the results.

Find me on GenJuice!

Possibly Related posts:

1. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update
2. Announcing Our Public Launch of Unanchor
3. Itinerary Update

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Hello from Seoul, South Korea (again)! Sharon and I have officially settled in and are happy to be back. More on that in a future post.

In today’s post I have an exciting announcement regarding Unanchor and I’d also like to give an update on the latest progress of the business.

What is Unanchor?

As a quick reminder, Unanchor.com is my travel startup company. We’re trying to cut down the amount of time it takes to research what to do and how to get around for your next vacation. To accomplish this, we sell self-guided tour itineraries.

The Announcement: Unanchor is Now Paying Itinerary Writers Upfront!

We’ve launched a new program today that pays writers an advance of up to $100 once an itinerary is approved. The great news is that writers will still earn 75% from each itinerary sold. This offer is only available for the first 50 approved itineraries.

How it works

1. Writers fill out our itinerary writer application form.
2. Once the application is approved, we’ll put the pending amount of the revenue advance into their Unanchor account.
3. Write and submit the itinerary.
4. After the itinerary is approved, we’ll release the money. We’ll pay via check or Paypal – there’s no fee for either.

How You Can Help

This is a great opportunity to earn some extra money from your knowledge of your hometown, current town or your travels. I’d really appreciate if you could share this announcement with anyone you think may be interested. Use any of these links to do so:

Share this on Facebook | Share this on Twitter | Email this to a friend

For more details on this announcement, check out our Unanchor Blog post.

Unanchor Update

Now for a brief update on what’s new with Unanchor.

• Itinerary Writer Profiles – We’ve added itinerary writer profiles. We believe that travelers will want to “get to know” the people behind the itineraries. And we now give them the ability to do that.
• Blog – We’ve launched a Blog where we’ll be posting travel tips, travel entrepreneur interviews, Unanchor product updates and much more.
• Incorporating – Unanchor Inc. is now officially a Delaware C-corp. It was an interesting and exciting process interviewing lawyers, choosing one, and then incorporating. It was also unfortunately a rather expensive process.
• Itinerary Proof of Concept – While not officially rolled out to our site yet, the most exciting thing we’ve been working on is what a future Unanchor itinerary will look like. Check out our 1-day San Francisco itinerary proof-of-concept. I’d love to hear your feedback on our proof of concept.

What’s Next?

• Itineraries! – It’s been far more difficult than I initially believed to get quality itineraries written for the site. Most of my focus will be spent on finding people who want to write itineraries.
• Country/City Pages – Right now, we lack a clean way to organize the site. In the next few weeks, we’re going to roll out country and city pages that will initially have only basic information on the destination and a list of the itineraries we have for the destination.
• Proof-of-concept Rollout – We don’t have a date set on the site-wide rollout yet, as there are quite a few details we still need to work out. The biggest one is, how will itinerary writers submit the itineraries? This is something we continue to work on.

Check out our Unanchor Blog Post for more on our new payment structure.

Help us share this announcement:     Facebook | Twitter | Email

As always, thanks for your support!

Possibly Related posts:

1. Announcing Our Public Launch of Unanchor
2. Unanchor Itinerary Writer Program Update
3. UnAnchor.Com Launch – Your Assistance Is Requested

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My co-founder, Mohammad, and I are very excited to announce that the next version of UnAnchor.com has officially launched. The new version has a brand-new design as well as a complete overhaul of the back-end code. In this post I’ll be discussing the details of the new version and what we’re working on next.

What is UnAnchor?

For those who are unfamiliar, UnAnchor is my travel start-up that launched this past May. UnAnchor is a marketplace of self-guided tour itineraries. Itineraries prioritize what to do and how to get around in your next travel destination so you can stop researching and start traveling.

UnAnchor 2.0

This initial launch is primarily cosmetic. However, the site has been completely rebuilt and it will now be far easier to add new features and scale up the site.

For the technical audience, the site no longer uses WordPress and has been rebuilt using PHP and the Symfony PHP framework.

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve officially launched the next version, we’re going to continue to build out features with the next version adding:

• Review System for the itineraries
• Public Profiles for the itinerary writers

The two main focuses from the business side are:

• Continuing to find itinerary writers
• Forming a team of advisors to help guide the direction of the site

As always, thanks for your support! Be sure to check out the new version. I’d also love to hear your feedback:

• What are your thoughts on the new design and the upcoming features?
• Do you have recommendations on finding itinerary writers?
• Finally, do you know someone or have a recommendation on someone who may be a good advisor? We’re looking for smart people interested in helping a young startup. Ideally, they would be in the travel industry or have connections within the travel industry.

Shoot me an email (Jason.Demant [at] gmail [dot] com) or leave a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Announcing Our Public Launch of Unanchor
2. UnAnchor.Com Launch – Your Assistance Is Requested
3. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update

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In the travel planning process, there are three primary problems that still have not been solved sufficiently:

1. When visiting a new city, it’s too difficult and time-consuming to choose the sights to see amongst all of the options.
2. Directions aren’t  specific enough and not enough maps are given.
3. Determining the best way to travel between two cities is too difficult and time-consuming.

Seeing these issues arise time and time again and talking with fellow travelers led me to realize the potential business opportunity of solving these problems. In the following post, I’ll discuss how my startup, UnAnchor, will solve the first two problems and may one day also solve the third.

1. Prioritizing Sights is Too Difficult

The Problem: When Sharon and I had 1 to 3 days in a new city, trying to choose what sights to see reminded me of walking into the cheese aisle at a grocery store — everything looks good, there are way too many to choose from and there is hardly any information. Most guidebooks give travelers two sentence descriptions for 30 historical landmarks and then expect you to choose a couple to see. I hate this process.

Why UnAnchor Solves It: A self-guided tour itinerary prioritizes the sights and attractions for the traveler based on how much time they have in a given city. Rather than forcing the inexperienced traveler to choose from a two-sentence description, an expert chooses for them.

Example: Beijing, China. It’s a HUGE city with a ridiculous amount of things to do. Using our “Lonely Planet” guidebook to try and choose the sights and attractions we were going to see was painful. Everything sounded great. Thankfully, because we were there for 10 days we got to see quite a few sights, but if I were only there for a couple days it would have been really tough to choose. After seeing a number of the sights, they were all good. A traveler isn’t going to be disappointed by having sights prioritized for them, they will be relieved by not having to go through the process of choosing sights.

2. Directions Aren’t Clear Enough

The Problem: Getting around a new city is really difficult. Knowing what bus stop to get off at or which subway to take is not enough information to find your way. Unfortunately, this is the extent most websites and guide books go.

Why UnAnchor Solves It: The directions are specific, clear and unambiguous. They include the necessary turns to make, the signs to look out for, and often include pictures and maps.

Why I think this will work: To be honest I believe this is a good interim solution. It’s still better than 95% of what’s out there. But, the perfect solution is using a Smartphone with GPS guided directions. Including this type of feature is a future goal for UnAnchor.

3. Getting Between Two Cities Is Too Difficult

The Problem: Determining the most efficient way to travel between two cities is difficult and time-consuming. Do you take a bus? A train? Do you fly?

Example: We were in Beijing and wanted to get to South Korea. There were flights, but they were very expensive because we had not booked in advance. Thankfully, there were a lot of ferry options; unfortunately though, there were too many ferry options. They departed from a few different cities and the amount of time they took to get to Korea varied significantly. Another factor that needed to be considered was the amount of money and time it took to get to the ferry’s departure city from Beijing.

Why UnAnchor Will Not Solve This Problem: Theoretically, one could write an itinerary detailing out the best way to get from Beijing to South Korea to solve my example. However, we’re not planning on initially focusing UnAnchor around this issue, nor is that a very scalable solution. A more elegant solution would be similar to Google Maps implementation of public transportation directions — laying out the various options while factoring in time and cost.

Bringing It All Together – My “Ah-ha” moment

I had been experiencing these problems regularly.  I grew  frustrated, but continued to find ways around them. It took a day of hiking on Cat Ba Island in Halong Bay, Vietnam to have my UnAnchor “ah-ha” moment.

There’s a famous national park featuring a popular hike on Cat Ba Island. Sharon and I were both interested in doing the hike, but every time we tried to find information about the hike or ask for a map of the park, the only thing people wanted to do was sell us an overpriced tour guide.

Determined to find another way, I spent a number of hours researching the hike. I found people online who said it was a nice and a reasonably easy hike, but despite my efforts, I was unable to find a map or anyone with detailed instructions on doing the hike. Eventually, Sharon and I just decided to do it on our own, map-less. We caught a motorbike taxi, found a boat to take us to the trailhead and headed off into the park. We got a late start, but headed out regardless. We hiked through a beautiful village and then eventually through some thick foliage. We began getting concerned and after realizing at one point that we had walked in multiple circles, we decided to give up and head back. While I was disappointed we didn’t get to complete the hike, I was proud of us for giving it a shot.

It was during this hike, I had my “ah-ha” moment and realized the potential for self-guided tour itineraries. Having a 1-day self-guided itinerary for a hike through the National Park would have been perfect. I gladly would have paid a few bucks for it.

What do you think?

Have you experienced these same issues? Do you agree with my findings? What other problems have you had while traveling that you think need to be solved?

Photo Credits: Moleskine, Lightbulb

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2. UnAnchor Update
3. Announcing UnAnchor 2.0

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For many, finding a partner/co-founder is an important step in building a new company. The process is often compared to getting married. It’s important to find someone that complements you and you get along well with. You may end up spending more time with your co-founder than your husband or wife. In the following post I’ll discuss the lengthy process I went through to find a technical co-founder for UnAnchor, my travel itinerary startup.

Why Find A Co-Founder?

As I started working on UnAnchor, I quickly realized my best path to success was finding a technical co-founder. There were a few reasons for it:

1. While I’ve advanced my technical skills significantly in the past few months, if UnAnchor is truly going to be successful, I will need help from someone with far more technical knowledge than I.
2. Frankly, working by yourself is lonely. Sitting in my Seoul and Busan apartments all day long coding was productive, but some social interaction every now and then was something I definitely missed.
3. While I pride myself on executing and getting things done, it’s still easy to let things slip when the only person holding you accountable is yourself. Having a partner adds an extra layer of accountability.

There are numerous other reasons why having a co-founder is a good idea, but I won’t be going into them during just yet. Instead, I’ll go through my process of finding a technical co-founder.

Resources for Finding A Technical Co-Founder

The best place to find a co-founder is within your own network. The ideal scenario would be to find someone you’ve worked with in the past and you know you get along with. In my case, unfortunately, I had no one that fit that bill. So, I went searching online. Here’s a list of resources I found and tried.

1.)    CoFounderGoogleDocs.Com — This was originally a Hacker News idea. Quite a few people are listed you can contact or you can just list yourself. I’ve listed myself and had 3 people contact me. My eventual co-founder found me through this profile.

2.)    TechCofounder.com — Another good list of people interested in joining a start-up. You can also list yourself. I’ve listed myself and had 2 people contact me. I also contacted about 5 people through the site and had serious conversations with a couple of them.

3.)    Find CoFounders LinkedIn Group — This group is surprisingly active. I recently posted my tech co-founder need to the group and had about 5 people contact me. Most of them were serious candidates, but just didn’t work out for various reasons.

4.)     Startup Digest Classifieds — They’ve recently started a classified section to go along with their normal weekly digest of startup events. I listed myself and received 1 inquiry.

The Process

After speaking with a number of people I ended up with 2 candidates that were a good match. We decided to start working together on the site without any sort of formal agreement, just to see how well we worked with each other. After all, the best way to find out if you can work with someone is by actually working with them.

The first person did not work out. However, after spending the last month working with each other, the second turned out great. I now consider my search for a co-founder complete.

My co-founder’s name is Mohammad, and he’s originally from New Zealand but now lives in London. Previously, Mohammad created and ran a web development consulting company, Virvo.com and he also blogs on Forouzani.com. I’m excited to have him on-board and am looking forward to what we can accomplish together.

What Are We Working on Now?

Mohammad and I are concentrating on relaunching the site, improving it visually (front-end) and making it more robust on the back-end. We’re targeting mid-December for the re-launch of the site. Alongside that we’re ironing out a more updated business plan that will most likely be the subject of a future post.

A Few Other Resources

Since I’ve now stopped my search for a co-founder, I have not had the opportunity to explore these resources all that much, but here a few more co-founder resources that I’ve run across.

FounderDating –An interesting program in Seattle and San Francisco that sets up entrepreneurs in a speed dating environment to help them find their ideal co-founder.

BuildItWith.Me – Very cool site with the goal of matching designers with developers.

StartupSquare – Requires applying to join, but once you do, you will find a number of people discussing and brainstorming ideas.

CoFounderNetwork – Again requires applying or being invited. I have not done either.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Unanchor Itinerary Writer Program Update
2. How A Non-Technical Founder Built NileGuide with Josh Steinitz
3. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update

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In a word, I would say things are going “okay”. While we were living in Busan, I spent most of my time building Keys To China, as well as writing my own Busan itinerary. Most of my focus on the site the past few months has been getting people to write itineraries.

Solving UnAnchor’s Chicken and Egg Problem

One of the largest challenges I face with making UnAnchor successful is solving the chicken and egg problem. Itinerary writers want users to be on UnAnchor, but users will not go on UnAnchor unless there are itineraries. My initial plan to solve this problem included reaching out to fellow travel bloggers and the Travel Blog Exchange community. I had good luck with finding places to guest post, as well as getting interviewed. Unfortunately, the traffic that resulted from these posts and interviews did not result in itineraries being created. After reflecting, I believe the traffic the blogs brought in was the wrong kind of traffic. These were people interested in travel in general, and reading good travel stories, not writing itineraries to make money. (However, I believe a lot of these people stuck around and now follow our blog instead.)

Trying Something New

I’m a big fan of test and measure. Try lots of things; drop the ones that don’t work, keep the ones that do. So, I’ve stopped trying to actively guest post and instead I’m now focusing my efforts on niche bloggers.

The niche blogger I’m specifically looking for are those who focus on a particular city or country. I realized niche bloggers are great candidates to write itineraries after meeting the author of Chris In South Korea. Chris has an awesome blog on South Korea, is an expert on Seoul, has a stream of visitors looking for information on Seoul, and is always looking for ways to monetize his blog. I’d love to help Chris and other niche bloggers like him monetize their blog traffic, while helping travelers find amazing things to do.

Now my goal is to find people like Chris who blog about a major city or area. So far, my search has been going well. I’ve emailed quite a few bloggers and gotten good overall response from them. Hopefully this will help push UnAnchor forward.

As always, if you know someone (or are someone) who is interested in writing an itinerary for UnAnchor, please let me know or just refer them to the site. For the first 50 itineraries, submitted, I’m going to be giving the writer 90% of what they charge, rather than the normal 75%. If you’re looking for an example itinerary, shoot me an email.

Finding a Co-Founder

I’ve long believed that my best chance of success with UnAnchor was to find someone equally passionate about travel and the idea as myself. I’ve been passively looking for a co-founder. Recently, I posted an ad (free) to CoFounderGoogleDocs.com. Someone contacted me through my post and after having a lengthy conversation with him, we’ve decided to do a trial run working together. After the trial run, I plan on writing a post to discuss how things went and how we approached the trial run.

Suggestions?

Lastly, I’d love to hear your thoughts or suggestions on solving my chicken and egg problem. How would you recommend I find qualified people interested in writing itineraries for UnAnchor? I can’t promise I’ll try out your suggestion immediately, but I do promise I’ll add it to my ongoing list of ideas. Send me an email (Jason.Demant [at] gmail [dot] com) or leave a comment below.

P.S.  Check out the new “I Love Travel Writing” Facebook Group

If you love travel writing or just want to find out more about it, check out my new “I Love Travel Writing” Facebook group. Internet permitting, I try and post something new to discuss about travel writing 5-times a week. Thanks to James for this suggestion!

Possibly Related posts:

1. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update
2. Finding A Technical Co-Founder & An UnAnchor.com Update
3. Unanchor Itinerary Writer Program Update

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For the past month or so, I’ve been working on a new side project. Unfortunately, this has taken a lot of my focus away from UnAnchor, but I’m excited about the opportunity the side project will addressing. The company’s name is “Keys To China” and it’s a place for job seekers to look for jobs in China and for companies to recruit candidates from outside of China. In this post, I’ll be explaining more about the company.

Keys To China was founded by a former Seagate colleague of mine (as well as a loyal LAC reader), Vivian Keys. The idea, at its simplest, is to match candidates from outside of China with jobs inside China.

Vivian was born, raised, and went to college in China. She speaks the language and understands the job market. She was struggling with the technical aspects of creating a website and approached me with suggestions. I decided to take it a step further and offer to create the website for her. Thankfully, many of the core features were similar to those required to create UnAnchor, so it didn’t require me to learn a lot of new things.

While I could try and butcher further explaining the site, I’ll let Vivian explain further:

Why are Chinese companies looking to hire people from outside of China?

The short answer is many different reasons. Here are a few:

• Many companies have moved their R&D center to China and while they hire mostly local, there are always a select few positions which are offered to expats.
• In one particular example, VMWare looked for people with a particular technology skill-set that only existed in the United States.
• Yet another scenario is if a Chinese business is looking to expand into the United States or European markets.
• Another example is if they’re trying to get listed on NYSE or Nasdaq stock exchanges. The companies need people with the right experience and language skills.
• Chinese companies are also trying to lure back the many workers who have left China and are living abroad.

Are there opportunities for non-Chinese speaking in China?

Of course. Again, back to the VMWare example, they weren’t particular about the language. They really needed someone with the technical knowledge. The local engineers can’t effectively communicate with the headquarters back in the U.S., so English speaking people are better than locals.

Then again, knowing some Chinese makes everyday life much easier, even when it’s not in the job description.

========================

As for how this will affect UnAnchor, the answer is I hope it won’t. I still plan on focusing most of my time going forward on UnAnchor — writing itineraries, marketing, and continuing to develop the site.

If you have a moment or just so happen to have an interest in looking for a job in China, head over KeysToChinaJobs.com and check it out. As always, I’d love to hear your feedback and suggestions on the site.

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There was no big announcement or marketing media blitz, but I’ve officially launched UnAnchor.com. A previous post explains my vision for the site.

The website is far from done however. I heard an interesting quote the other day that reassure me this is okay: “if you’re not embarrassed by the initial launch of your website (version 1.0), you waited too long” — I read and listen to many people and I’m not sure who said this.

While I’m proud of what I’ve done so far, there are many features missing. Rather than develop these without user feedback, I’ve decided to launch now, start trying to find itinerary writers and customers, and find out what features they want. (This entrepreneurial strategy is courtesy of Mixergy Interviews, 37Signals, Jason Cohen, Dharmesh Shah, Jason Calcanis/This Week In Startups)

Chicken or the Egg?

The initial obstacle I face is a classic “chicken and egg” problem. I need itineraries to sell to users, and I also need users to attract itinerary writers.

The good news about UnAnchor is that it’s unlike eBay, Craigslist, or GroupOn (other sites that faced a chicken-and-egg problem), where one needs a critical mass of people to make the website effective. With 1 itinerary, I could get that itinerary ranked in Google, promote it on Twitter, buy Google Ad-words and sell it. Sure, it helps if I have many people surfing on the site looking for itineraries, but it’s not a requirement.

With this in mind, I’ll be focusing on recruiting itinerary writers initially – after all, I need something to sell.

The “$0 Recruit Itinerary Writers” Marketing Plan

I’d love to be able to throw money at this problem, but for now, this isn’t an option. Instead, my initial plan is to reach out to my favorite fellow travel bloggers and beg and plead for an interview, review of UnAnchor.com, or a guest post. Readers of these travel blogs are perfect for writing itineraries – they are smart, passionate people who love traveling and are interested in making extra money. I’ll be reaching out to Christine Gilbert (Almost Fearless), Chris Guillebeau, Foxnomad, ManVsDebt, Kirsty Henderson (Nerdy Nomad), NomadicMatt, Nora Dunn (The Professional Hobo).

In addition, I plan on connecting with people on the Travel Blog Exchange (TBEX). TBEX is a large community of travel bloggers (over 2,500 in fact). I’ve been looking into it, but am still trying to figure out how best to go about it while trying not to seem “spammy”.

A third interesting tool is Twitter. Twitter allows you to set up monitored searches, such that every time someone tweets out “travel itinerary”, for example, I could be alerted. With this set of people, I could then send a message to them, telling them about UnAnchor. I want to be careful with this one as well, as it also could be potentially “spammy”.

I’d like to end this post by making the ridiculous observation of: “Wow, the Internet is really cool”. I was able to build a potential business for essentially nothing (maybe $100) and now will be marketing it – again, for essentially nothing. It’s an amazing thing and it’s an amazing time we live in.

Am I missing something in my Marketing plan? Did I miss your favorite travel blogger? Let me know, or better yet, make me an introduction!

Possibly Related posts:

1. UnAnchor.Com Launch – Your Assistance Is Requested
2. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update
3. Announcing Our Public Launch of Unanchor

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After many hours holed up in our Seoul apartment, I am ready to begin launching the site and I need your help to do so.

I’d like your help in testing out the site. This will only take a couple minutes of your time and will be an enormous help to me.

Head over to http://www.UnAnchor.com and please consider the following while using the site:

1. If the homepage was the first time you had ever heard of UnAnchor, does it explain the site well enough? What recommendations do you have to grab and explain the site to users?
2. The “About-Us”, “Become A Writer”, “Itinerary Recommendations”, are they clear?
3. Create an Itinerary (you’ll need to create an account to do so) – What could be clearer in this process? Do all of the places to input the itinerary make sense? Can you find help if needed?

If you have any other feedback on the site, please let me know. You can do so by leaving a comment below, emailing me at Jason [at] LifeAfterCubes.Com or using the Contact form.

Final note – purchasing an itinerary will not actually charge your credit card yet.

As always, thanks for your support!

Possibly Related posts:

1. Announcing Our Public Launch of Unanchor
2. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update
3. Announcing UnAnchor 2.0

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In a previous post I discussed my decision to start and build UnAnchor.com – a platform for users to create do-it-yourself travel itineraries for other travelers to purchase. In this post, I’m going to discuss how I’m actually going about the creation of the site.

To be honest, I have very little experience in building web applications. In college, I took a few computer science classes where I learned the programming basics – but other than that, I really don’t have much experience. In essence, I started from the beginning.

I decided to go the book route and read the electronic version of “Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites” – it was an excellent book. It taught me the basics I needed to get going. Many of the code examples they gave were extremely practical and I was able to directly use them in building UnAnchor. I constantly refer back to the book as I run into issues.

My biggest resource, though, is Google. I continue to be amazed by the amount of helpful information there is out there on every topic. Here are a few excellent sites I’ve discovered so far:

• Stackoverflow – Question and Answer site for all technical, back-end queries
• HotScripts – Good collection of pre-built scripts
• Doctype – Question and Answer site for the front-end (HTML, CSS)

How’s the site coming so far?

It’s going well. I’m finishing a good amount of the back-end items at the moment and then will get started on making it look pretty (front-end). I’m targeting early-April for a beta launch and so far I still believe I can hit that time period. I am going to need some help, however, and I’ll be asking for it in future posts.

Off-Topic Thought

Sharon and I recently watched the excellent documentary, “A Map For Saturday” – it’s about a twenty-something filmmaker who quits his job at HBO to travel around the world for a year. He stays at hostels, lives out of his backpack and video tapes the entire experience.

If you’re at all curious as to what Sharon and my life has been like the last 5 months, or just want to see a really well made documentary, I highly recommend it. Thanks to John, who told us about the movie!

Photo Credit: Anders Adermark

Possibly Related posts:

1. UnAnchor.Com Launch – Your Assistance Is Requested
2. Announcing UnAnchor 2.0
3. Unanchor.com Announcement & Update

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