Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Marcela Barsse


I like this phrase coined (as far as I know) by Guy Kawasaki in his post "The Art of Bootstrapping".

I talked about it a bit as well when chatting about bootstrapping an on line record label with KasondraK and Jeronimo Black, co-hosts of the Success in the Music Business podcast in an interview this past Sunday.

I've spent most of this weekend living by those words as I put together the main pages of PostRanger.com, a blogging social network I've been trying to get up and running for at least a year.

The pages are pretty simple lists of links organized by category. Here are the ones I've got so far:
• Arts & Entertainment
• Brand & Marketing
• Business & Entrepreneurship
• Career & Family
• Energy & Economy
• Film & Television
• Food & Accommodation
• Health & Science
• Journalism & Photography

More are on the way.

These pages aren't fancy, as you can see. The sub-categories in turn will be linked to a homepage, a blog supplied by TypePad.

The idea is to add categories and more links as we go. I'm looking for inexpensive ways (maybe partners) to supply a better design for the link pages and the main blog itself.

I've got some ideas and need someone to translate those visions into Cascading Style Sheets that can be loaded onto TypePad and give the whole thing a more distinctive look.

I'm bootstrapping remember (no startup budget) so if there are any designers out there who would be interested in doing the work in return for credit and a link or e-mail on all my sites so people who like your work can find you, let me know.

Also I'm looking for any programmers out there who might be willing to team up with me to create a platform for this whole thing. My idea is to have a sign-up arrangement very much like MySpace et. al. where you can just join and start blogging.

I could also use help figuring out the best way to monetize this thing so if you've got a thought, don't keep it to yourself.

If you've got a blog you think would fit into one of these categories or a category I haven't thought of yet I'm all ears. I'll have the rest of the category pages (at least the ones I'm starting with) done by tomorrow so stay tuned for another post and more links. Thanks!