Ok, it’s now 3 weeks since doors opened. Business is steady and received a nice kick from Thursday’s Age article.

So far:

• 315 people have registered, with 214 activated for renting.
• 1677 movies have been bookmarked
• 47 movies have been requested that aren’t in the system
• Catalogue rentals out-number new release rentals

There’s quite a way to go, but the start looks great. I’m aiming for 2000 renting members by the end of my first full year, which works out to be about 6 signups per day. I’m already ahead of 6/day, and as awareness builds I should improve on that. 2000 by the end of 12 months seems very achievable.

1677 bookmarked movies! That’s fantastic. It shows people *do* have an interest in the back catalogue, and it’s quite amazing that once you start looking, how many great movies are out there that we’ve missed. That’s also shown by my back catalogue out-renting by volume, new releases. This all relates to the retail model of The Long Tail, which I’ll break down in a future post.

The other interesting stat is that I’ve had 47 requests for non-stocked titles. That shows a lot of people have that one movie in the back of their memory that they’ve always wanted to watch. I’m giving them the catalogue to search through and easily discover if I have it. When I don’t, it’s a quick ‘you didn’t have’ at the counter, and I jot the title down and see if I can get it in - and I’m keen to build my catalogue on requests so please, keep ‘em coming!

Updated 9/10 - 2000 members to the end of my first full year (ie after 12 months of operation), not the end of 2007 (ie in 2 months)

Woot! Heres the article: Watching This Space.

Way to go Adam, thanks for the write up! My doors opened not quite 3 weeks ago - so it’s fantastic to be given this visibility. For anyone wanting a better view of the space, check out these hi-res photos:

1. Inside 1
2. Inside 2
3. Inside 3
4. Dusk

David Johns the neighbourhood gallery owner - snapped these for me. I’ve been meaning to incorporate these into the website, but yikes, trying to find development time at the moment is well nigh impossible. Working 7 days a week in my store is soaking up quite a bit of time - but I’m loving it

What happens when you can’t contact your co-lo provider, via email, 1300 voice mail, control panel ticket, and then find his mobile doesn’t deliver a dial tone?

You start to worry.

Servers aren’t exactly perpetual motion machines. They freeze up if someone like me messes too much with them. Hardware failures do occur, memory needs to be added, disc, power supplies can fail. If any of that happens, I need access ASAP to fix it, and when I can’t raise my colo company AT ALL, it’s time to get out. And it’s been an intense few days getting out.

After much calling, I raise the account manager who deals with my colo reseller*, and find they can’t get him either, and have placed his account in dispute. If it goes legal, the cabinet gets locked and my server with it. Bye bye server. DANG. This is getting seriouser by the minute. Ok. more calls, and finally get a response from my colo reseller and yep - I can pull my server. Phew. Sourcing another HP dl385 2xdual core Opteron, 8Gig RAM, SAS RAID ain’t exactly a 7-11 pickup (even though this isn’t a high end machine by any account). From ordering to setup I reckon is prob 4-5 days at best.

So, server comes out at 10.00am Sunday morning - where’s it going to go? Full thanks to Chris at Intervolve for not breaking a sweat and getting me booked in for 10.30am Sunday. The story doesn’t end there of course. Nothing ever goes smoothly, and with the machine all hooked up I then discover I had problems seeing the IP addresses I use for my shop systems. So - back down to manual checkouts (people could still find and rent DVDs) - and with my head stuck in an ssh session trying all sorts of re-config options, and still chatting happily to customers and demoing the system - what a day! Thanks again to Chris - he stepped in later and dealt with the problem and so all is now good. If it doesn’t kill ya it’ll make you stronger as they say!

* For the non-techs out there (bless you all :-), co-location is when I physically place my server in someone else’s data centre facilities, which offers temperature control, backup power, secure access, internet connectivity, fire fighting kit and so on. In my case, I use a reseller of data centre space, as the big data centres don’t want to deal with a small player like me.