Pallian Creative

Pallian UPDATES!

Wow - talk about slack! Last time I updated this blog was on a plane ride back from TC50… tons have happened since then that I don’t know where to begin. Things have been happening so fast that before I could finish up a blog post, something new pops up. Today, I got an email from Doug Williams, Biz Dev for Twitter, and he casually noted “…I’ve read and enjoyed your blog for a while…”. Something about that made me want to blog again and here we are! To really catch up on what I’m up to now, we’ve got to travel back in time to where we left off, so here goes:

Oct 2009 - I decide to open up an office and hire some talent. Like all things that happen with me, this decision came over lunch with a friend at an obscure Chinese restaurant eating some dim sums. I knew I could not go on forever working in my apartment, and felt it was the right time to get a bigger space and hire. As many of you know - I design websites for a living. As much as I’m passionate about startups and the sub-culture that goes with it, I enjoy designing websites and getting paid for it. Over the years I’ve built a pretty large network of financial clients who seems to always want a new blog or website, and it always pays the startup bills. I figured if I opened up an office and hired some designers and developers to do all the contract work, I could sit back and really focus on my social shopping startup JustBought.it. Unfortunately, that didn’t really pan out as anticipated. What ended up happening was we secured a nice open space, hired 4 new designers but instead of me taking a back seat and focussing on my startup, I ended up having to manage and coach my new team and do quality control for my clients. And to make things more complicated, with all this new found confidence to design and develop websites faster, I took in as many as 8 new clients in a span of 4 weeks. The money was great… but.. well lets move on to November.

November 2009 - Office is running smoothly - team is happy - money is great, BUT, instead of working on my startup, I ended up being my own project-manager for clients. It reached a point where I knew I had to hire someone just to run Pallian Creative. And as luck would have it, a casual chat with my old college mate, the very smart and talented Rasheed Akhtar, solved that problem. I flew in Rasheed from Winnipeg to Vancouver (twice!) in November to first and foremost make him love the city (that was easy!) and to convince him that we have a growing and profitable business here that needs a good COO. I think it was the right combination of the few sunny days we had in November when he was visiting and the office coffee maker that sold him - he took on the position! Which brings us to December.

December 2009 - With Rasheed on board and running the day to day operations, I spent all my time on JustBought.it knowing that the holiday season was critical to it’s success. We re-launched the site, got a great press mention on techcrunch and got some really good momentum going. Around the same time, I came up with the very awesome idea of launching a blog called ThisIsAwesome.com to showcase some of the awesome things getting shared on justbought.it along with the awesome finds we find on twitter. Luckily got a great deal to buy the domain for cheap and will be launching this awesome blog this week. The blog is so damn awesome that I think it deserves an entire post on its own, which I will publish when we go live on friday.

January 2010 - This bring us to the past 30 days and what an amazing 30 days it has been! We have so many updates and features coming up on JustBought.it that it’s making me giddy. Shopping as we know it now is going to change, and being on the forefront of technology that changes it is very very exciting. I’m going to write an entire post on what we’ve been cooking up in the next week, so look out for that. We are also looking for Angel investors to help take social shopping to the next level. If you can think of a VC or a private investor who would be the right fit in this space, please get in touch.

And finally, here we are on the 2nd day of February and I want to update you on a couple of quick things:

1. Pallian.com is getting a major facelift by the end of this month. This blog will still be active, it will just go through a branding and re-design phase to showcase some of the amazing work my team at Pallian Creative have been doing. This current theme is for sale for a low price of $99. You can just paypal me and I’ll send you the theme via email. The theme comes as-is with no support - but if you’re a wordpress junkie, you should have no issues installing the theme and have your site running within minutes.

2. The Winter Olympics are here in 10 days and since this city is going to be in a security/traffic lockdown - we decided to have a little fun with it. I invited a very special french journalist to stay with us during the Olympics and today, I’m proud to introduce THE GASTON REPORT. He arrives on the 12th of February and all I can say is if you’re going to watch the Olympics, bookmark his website, friend him on twitter and fan him on facebook - because he’s going to show you winter olympics like you’ve never seen before!

Stay tuned! Lots of exciting things coming your way… and follow me on twitter for all the latest updates.