Bounty Up is a service to collect online donations for a project, like the wildly successful MyFreeImplants.com, but for the rest of us — I wish I was kiddin’ about that site’s success. The tagline on BountyUp is “Ask for what you want, let the crowd pay for it.” Like the tagline, I’m being tongue in cheek, BountyUp has actually been used for a lot of wonderful projects.

It’s awesome to see an article about BountyUp’s service in the Times Colonist. The TC is Vancouver Island’s only widely distributed paper and is owned by CanWest Global Communications.

There is at least a couple of egregious errors in Tom Mcmillan’s article. The first “crowd-surfing” being comical, the second “millions” being a reminder of BountyUp’s potential.

The article also shares some of the wonderful details of the BountyUp story so far including:

• “… donations to fund projects for Oak Bay science students, North Carolina choirs and Middle East social activists.”
• “Starting out, I really wanted to change the world,” McKenty said.

I think I was among the first Joshua shared the idea with, and the passion to change the world was an important part of the equation from the beginning. He has done a great job applying his Web 2.0 expertise on this service, while continuing to work on other projects.

Hopefully, this article reflects momentum for the service, and BountyUp will have much deserved success!

Boris is a dear friend. Danny I recently met and was very impressed by. Their backers — well, Boris says they aren’t a fund, but it is safe to say they are very well connected in Vancouver and aboard.

When putting together a startup people tend to be most concerned with securing the $$. But there’s so much more to a startup than getting the seed money.

These guys will help you find the funding to take your product/service and turn it into a business. But what you will discover along the yellow brick startup road is, if you don’t want to wind up crushed by your house or enslaved by the wicked warlocks of the West, you need good advice, good advisors.Even if you already have the funding you need and know what you are doing, access to the best advisors is invaluable:

What we’ve been looking for is the wisdom of a very special entrepreneur who’s been through what we’re going through. Someone who sees things a little differently and makes us feel right at home. Someone with a long term outlook, not a build-to-flip mentality.

If I was putting together my own startup, I would ask, beg, plead, literally do everything possible to get Boris to be an advisor. With Bootup Labs that is part of the package.

Back in November, Boris let me in on some of the details of the “package” (and there sounds to be a lot more than just a package here. Lots of dynamic elements specific to each startup’s unique needs), but it isn’t my story to tell, so subscribe to Bootup Labs blog. What I want to know is how he will balance this and his role as VP Product Development for Raincity Studios — I know he will find the time, but I want to know his secrets

The first lessons if you want to reach your goals in a small company is that you have to be willing to do every job, and will probably have to do many of them. You have to be flexible, there is no organizational hierarchy to assign the work to.

So although not in my job description doesn’t include PHP programming, it will help me be a better participant in the company and in the products I care most about.

Discovering and isolating problems comes fairly naturally to me, as does duplicating other’s results, but turning a coding problem into a solution no longer does — I’m long out of practice, and that practice never included PHP.

Sure, I can fix a typo or add a token or two of code, but I’m long out of practice in creating real solutions. Getting there would give me a much better understanding of the WordPress code, and ultimately the experience.

I have my PHP book, PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Willing and Laura Thomson (purple spine, aquaducts on cover), have plenty of small projects on my mind, and will find the time, but first I feel like I want to find myself a crutch of a good PHP development environment.