Media Curmudgeon

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January 13, 2007

Don't Do Business With Five Across

When I funded and was CEO of DailyComedy.com, I made a lot of mistakes--worthy of a book on how not to run an Internet business. One of the worst mistakes I made was doing business with a Silicon Valley company named FiveAcross that wrote the software for the architectural platform for the website. It was a disaster from the beginning. Don't do business with FiveAcross, the platform doesn't work.

At the first demonstration, their sleazy salesman answered every question I had about the software with the same desperate answer, "we can do that." At subsequent meetings and when I was finalizing the contract, I got the same desperate-to-close-the-deal answer: "we can do that."

DailyComedy.com went live August 1, 2006, and we had nothing but trouble with the overpromised, underdelivered platform product. It seemed to me the site was down more than it was up. I receved frustrated emails from people who heard our ads on XM and Sirrius Satellite Radio and couldn't use the site, log in, or create a comedy stage. The software was highly unstable, so unstable, in fact, that FiveAcross had to constanly try to tweak it and kept it on their own servers rather than move it to the servers I had leased. It was a mess. FiveAcross was horribly understaffed and underfunded and was therefore awful to deal with when we could get them on the phone--all except their overworked tech guy, Jer Grannuici, who was a good guy and who left out of frustration. As a result of the software mess and due to the fact that DailyComedy.com had such tiny traffic that it could never be profitable, I closed the site on Novermber, 30, 2006.

I was promised that we could drag and drop pictures from one page to another. We couldn't. I was promised we could serve ads using the FiveAcross platform. We couldn't. I was promised FiveAcross had a mass email program that worked. It didn't. I was promised that FiveAcross would delver a usuable Help section. They delivered a totally inadequate section for an old product and I had to write a new help section from scratch.

The chaos continued. Five Across fired the genius programmer who wrote the initial architecture, but fired him too soon (I think he could have fixed it). That was a mistake. It wasn't a mistake when they fired the sleazy salesman, but it was a mistake when they let their head tech guy walk out--only smart guy in the company. FiveAcross's COO said to the DailyComedy.com COO in November that we would get a $10,000 rebate (at least that is what I was told). That never happened. Someone was lying.

Some advice: Never do business with FiveAcross, they are not to be trusted and their product stinks. It's better to go with open-source software. It might take more time, but open-source software is more flexible than a closed proprietary system and easier to update.

Posted by Charles Warner at January 13, 2007 12:48 AM

Comments

Media Curmudgeon at January 17, 2007 11:07 AM writes:

Ivan Pope at January 17, 2007 06:54 AM writes:

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