Ask YC: I could use your comments on my project and plans to monetize it
My project is officezilla.com which I started in 2001 and released the first version in 2002. It is a
simple groupware collaboration system it handles a lot of things calendars, projects, forums, and
such.

I worked on it for two years but then ran into funding problems. I was able to do a big rewrite in
2003 and I have been doing small imrprovements since. About a year ago I started working on it
more actively again. I am a single founder..

Stats:
OfficeZilla accounts 12,018
OfficeZilla total users 27,740
Signups in the last 30 days 497 (which is average)

After thinking about different plans to make this into a revenue generating system I
decided that people will not pay for the basic features but they do want customization
to fit there needs exactly. I have enough users to take a segment and develop to there needs
so I decided upon realty agents.

So I started putting together RealtyGoLive.com (it looks terrible right now forgive me) which would have:

1. The collaboration system customized to an realty agents office

2. A website system with websites for each agent, and an office website (the aggregated listing). I already have the start on this, totally integrated and managed from the collaboration system. So management is all done in one place.

3. A PBX system where agents would have a mailbox for each house, could leave details and recieve
messages to email, faxing out and so on. Lots of good stuff, I like the pbx idea.

4. And other features too many to list but I think I could get them done in around 3 months or so if I was
working on them full time

I am currently hosting the system on an older server with 2 gigabytes of ram and 2 x 800mhz processors.
I have a dedicated sql server, again it is an older server dual 1ghz processors and 2 gigabytes of ram. I
also have two 1 terabyte nas systems for file storage and backup. People get really mad when I loose there
files which has happened thus I got the two nas systems which cost me more money then I could afford.

I sometimes feel a bit behind the times, I am not really into lots of javascript and I am not doing any ajax
type things at all. On another project I did, I do plan to implement some changes in this regard to make the
system look a little better and save the data differently, as they move from field to field for example. The
scripting language for the system is now out-of-favor but I have like 100,000 lines of code and I don't feel a great
need to go and do a re-write, I can't do it, it would take a long time and everything works fine now. I even have
rss feeds for (nearly) every feature.

I applied to YC with the RealtyGoLive idea, but I am not sure if that was the best angle to give YC
so I am expecting to not make the hurdle there but I feel like I can compete with the likes of
http://www.alamode.com/products/Broker/BrokerXsites/default.... and turn RealtyGoLive.com into
a million dollar business (at least) and maybe take it world wide because realty is sold everywhere and the
system is already internationalized.

I spent a couple of the years not really working on the system much and that hurt, I am now working on tieing all of the modules
together better they already have a group permissions that run accross everything (which is the whole basis of the system) but I also want tie the different data together. For example if you open contacts you could also see any other related information in other modules.
There is a lot to do to catch the system up. It is not bad, people who use it, use it a lot.

I know everyone here is real big on languages running on Linux/BSD (which when I first started creating websites
in 1996 that all I did was apache/linux/perl) but I discovered the power of databases and ASP was the big thing, PHP
was around but didn't seem as good in 1999 when I got ASP heavily and I am still doing things like it is 1999.
That is so out of character for this board I thought I would bring it up and see what you think of my system and
see think about my unusual development system in todays environment.